BRITAIN 
AND THE WAR 

ANDRE CHEVRILLON 



WITH A PREFACE BY 

RUDYARD KIPLING 



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BRITAIN AND THE WAR 



BRITAIN AND 
THE WAR 



BY 

ANDRE CHEVRILLON 



WITH A PREFACE BY 

RUDYARD KIPLING 



HODDER AND STOUGHTON 

LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO 

1917 



.C53 



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I FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH 
EDITION 



"Britain and the War" was first published as a 
series of articles in the Revue de Paris from Novem- 
ber 1915 to January 1916. It deals with a phase of 
England's war effort and life which may now be con- 
sidered as closed. Some of the facts recorded here 
(for instance, what we say of England's first success 
against the German submarines) have even ceased 
to be true — though this too may be but a transient 
phase. Yet in the period described here arose the 
forces which make England's present achievements 
possible — arose changes in her modes of thought 
and life, which will affect the whole of her future. 
What makes the eighteen months with which 
this book is specially concerned the essential 
period in the English history of the war, is that 
it is characterised by facts, chiefly psychological. 
England's awakening to the unexpected and tre- 
mendous reality of the war ; her gradual discovery 
of her enemy's deadly hatred and purpose; the 
rising and spreading of the idea that in time of 
national peril, military service is a duty for every 
able-bodied Englishman; the appeal to the indi- 
vidual conscience ; the working of the mind which 
resulted in milHons voluntarily taking the pledge; 
the dead weight of old traditions, habits, and pre- 
judices ; the cross and counter- currents of class and 
party ideas, whose acquired momentum could not. 



vi FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH EDITION 

in a free democracy like England, but persist for 
some time and interfere with the general effort at 
adaptation ; finally, the fusion of all tendencies into 
one collective will and movement, enabling the 
State to organise the country for national service 
and culminating in the law of conscription : — such 
facts belong to the spiritual order, to that life of 
the soul from which spring all the material acts and 
productions of men. In human affairs, somebody 
said, the deepest view is reached when we con- 
sider them, not as appearances but as decisions. 
And Mr. H. G. Wells, quoting this saying in his 
Future in America, added that the essential factor 
in the destiny of a nation lies in the form of its Will, 
the quality and quantity of its Will. The history 
of Germany's will to war began long before the 
war, but the history of England's will to war (this 
book may contribute to make it quite clear) only 
began with the war, and we may say that the essen- 
tial part of the narrative ends at the passing of the 
Conscription Bill. After that, the psychological 
condition of England is very much the same as 
that of the other great belligerents. Her part of 
the story becomes purely material, industrial and 
military; she goes on fighting, she perfects her 
weapons and methods : the will is formed and 
cannot change. 

Of the rise and growth of her will this little book 
gives a rapid sketch. That the model was moving 
under our eyes whilst it was being pencilled was a 
disadvantage which has perhaps its compensations. 

Andre Chevrillon. 
January 25, 1917. 



PREFACE 

This book, by my friend, Andre Che- 
vrillon, tells how England met and is taking 
the strain of the war. 

It is, of course, difficult for outsiders to 
comprehend the organically intimate relation 
which has grown up between France and 
England during the last two years. Necessity, 
at first, and later the habit of common effort, 
brought about this fusion till, to-day, mutual 
love and trust are so taken for granted that 
we have almost ceased to think about them. 
But as between man and wife, so between 
the nations whom this war has joined 
together, the mystery and the wonder of 
the union remains unsubdued. Each asks 
himself " What in essence is this other soul 
to whose hands I entrust my life and honour 
through all chances ? What springs move 
it ? What Gods possess it ? Above all, to 

vii 



viii PREFACE 

what power does it refer when it needs that 
help which no mortal can give ? " Monsieur 
Chevrillon answers these questions, with the 
knowledge of the psychologist and the pro- 
found sympathy of one long acquainted 
with our Hves, our history, and the expres- 
sion, formal or idiomatic, of our thoughts. 

If all his conclusions are not flattering to 
our self-esteem, the fault is not with him. 

He draws an accurate picture of a people al- 
most as aggressively educated and organised 
for extravagant peace as were the Germans 
for the extravagances of war— blind and deaf 
to visible menace and reiterated warning, and 
still further weakened by German agency 
which had, of set design, exploited and 
infected as much as it could among Enghsh 
journalism, finance, and politics to confuse, 
delay and disorganise counsel and action. 
We realise now that the enemy before the 
war laboured to some purpose in the fruitful 
soil of our national weaknesses and prejudices. 
How far they went, who were their dupes 
and who their accomplices, will be passed 
upon later, but, two years ago, England 
saw very little and imagined less of these 



PREFACE ix 

things. Admitting it would have been 
impossible for any civilisation, at that time, 
to have conceived the German as he has 
now revealed himself, we must recall that 
far the larger section of English intellectual 
leadership and political opinion had, for 
many years, given itself with passion to a 
world of strictly insular outlook which not 
only disregarded, but took for its doctrine 
and its shibboleth to deny, the very possi- 
bility of war. If facts did not conform to 
their view, so much the worse for the facts 
and for those who reported them. As 
M. Chevrillon says with illuminating in- 
sight of that vanished England, it was a 
land of " Governments too dependent upon 
popular opinion not to follow instead of 
leading it ; of politicians too concerned for 
popular reforms — their sole reason for exist- 
ence — to recognise the most pressing ac- 
tualities ; of a democracy too wrapped up 
in its dreams, passions, and party strife 
to see the coming of its aggressor." 

To such a community an instant choice 
between peace and war was presented out 
of a hohday sky, at the sword's point, 



X PREFACE 

over the body of Belgium. England, as a 
whole, knew nothing of the situation which 
Germany had scientifically prepared for her 
undoing. One might say that outside her 
Navy she possessed relatively little more 
than certain ancestral instincts of right 
and wrong — ^that implanted conscience 
which, as M. Chevrillon says, will save her. 
Germany, he explains, had a double reason 
for counting on the inaction of the land she 
regarded as her future prey. She believed 
that her methodical propaganda in com- 
mercial, labour and dissenting circles would 
have enfeebled England's moral strength 
to her ends. Nor did it enter her mind 
that a people who had so clearly willed not to 
arm themselves for war would arm for duty's 
sake. Here, it seems to me, M. Chevrillon 
omits a third point which has always been a 
factor in Germany's reckoning— England's 
secular dependence upon the Navy, and her 
equally ancient habit of regarding it as her 
main contribution to all emergencies. How- 
ever this may be, the incredible, from the 
German point of view, happened. England 
went to war, literally and coldly, on a point 



PREFACE xi 

of conscience. She could not have done 
otherwise. 

Some day we may learn with what ap- 
pallingly insignificant material backing, 
her land forces were committed to the 
work. M. Chevrillon traces our initial un- 
preparedness in this respect. The sea-power 
that unites and upholds, comes less within 
his study, even as the guardian fleets them- 
selves are veiled from men's sight. He deals 
step by step with the gradual awakening 
of a people who were at first no more than 
resolute for war as the sole means to adjust 
intolerable wrong. He shows how, later, 
when they had seen all known standards of 
evil-doing overtopped by a power that stood 
outside humanity — when, as he says, they 
had " recommenced to believe in the Devil " 
— ^they addressed themselves to its overthrow 
in much the same sombre temper as a 
man self-convinced of sin brings all body, 
soul and mind to his struggle for re- 
demption. And that view of our attitude 
is just if, as he argues throughout, 
England has since her origin been rather a 
natural growth than any designed product 



xii PREFACE 

of conscious thought on the part of a few 
clever individuals. Her people have ac- 
cepted little from without, and have instinc- 
tively cut down that little to the barest 
needs of any situation which imposed itself. 
Spiritually as well as intellectually and 
physically, England has been slow to take 
that thought which is supposed to add a 
cubit to the national stature. What came 
to her of power came as growth to a tree 
—unsystematically, but visibly accommo- 
dated to the experience of wind and weather, 
cumbered with many excrescences, yet in 
every fibre alive and the home of free and 
variegated lives. 

Knowledge, pure intelligence and the like, 
England in her heart has never reckoned 
among her first values. Her achievements 
along these lines have placed her in the fore- 
front of spiritual civilisation, yet to all 
appearance, and possibly in all truth, this 
has been an accident as huge and as puzzling 
to the world without as the accretion of her 
inexplicable Empire. 

On v\^hat then does our national struc- 
ture rest, since it obviously lacks reason 



PREFACE xiii 

and logic as those are understood else- 
where ? M. Chevrillon answers, upon sheer 
character and morals — adherence to an ele- 
mentary standard of right and wrong, 
judged for himself by the individual con- 
cerned. In his own words : " Le principe, 
d'origine politique et protestante, c'est que 
I'Anglais, parce qu'il a conquis par un effort 
seculaire ses libertes sur le pouvoir central, 
et parce qu'il est responsable envers Dieu 
de tous ses actes, gouverne lui-meme sa 
personne et sa vie." 

To this point he returns again and again as 
the ultimate secret of England for good or 
evil. Out of this spirit, jealous of control and 
stubborn of belief, were born those multitudes 
who went silently to arms under pressure 
of their own convictions in the first year 
of the war. They had few aids to enthusiasm, 
and of stage-management on the part of the 
State there was none. The conception of a 
State omnipotent for war did not exist. 
Even the recruiting appeals of the posters, 
rightly examined, are, for the most part, in the 
nature of reproaches to the defaulter or 
hints of the punishment his conscience will 



xiv PREFACE 

presently deal out to him if he does not 
answer the summons. The State from the 
continental point of view hardly comes into 
the picture until the people's sense of right 
and wrong tardily persuades it that it 
would be but justice to enact conscription. 

Monsieur Chevrillon's analysis of the 
national mind— especially the chapters on 
" The Appeal to Conscience "—is nearer the 
root of the matter than anything that has 
yet been written by any Englishman. One 
may say that he lays too much stress on the 
puritan and religious side of it — those very 
qualities whose defects have been so subtly 
used by the enemy, and in time past have 
laid us open to the charge of hypocrisy. 
Yet, when the blow fell, the people as a 
whole acted on those qualities rather than 
any intellectual promptings. Immemorially 
trained to refer all thought and deed to 
certain standards of right and wrong which, 
they held, lay equally on all men, they had 
to deal with an enemy for whom right and 
wrong do not exist except as the State 
decides. Small wonder that, at first, they 
realised neither themselves nor that enemy. 



PREFACE XV 

France, by experience burned into her en- 
during soul, knew, remembered, and in great 
part stood organised against possibilities. 
England grew to the needs of the case, in- 
articulate as always, and, once again, with 
the defects of her qualities well to the front. 
Inarticulate she was, since the ornate ex- 
pression of sentiment has never been prac- 
tised by any class ; and the same spiritual 
motive which leads a man to enlistment as 
though it were a religious conversion, makes 
his nation slower to insist on what it has 
done than what is left undone. This attitude 
is misleading ; but crisis cannot change 
character. If we are good shopkeepers, we 
have always been bad window-dressers. So 
the carefully circulated legend, first that 
England could give no help to her Allies, and 
secondly, that she was giving as little as she 
could, must be allowed to die out in slaughter 
and disillusionment. 

For obvious reasons, the author does 
not deal except in general terms with 
England's war- work ; but shows us with an 
insight and affection few others possess the 
very pulse of the machine— the spirit that 

h 



xvi PREFACE 

created the effort. His analysis is brought 
up to the end of 1915 only. Not a little blood 
has flowed since that date and the land's 
temper whose birth and growth he traces has 
set and hardened. We know now that the 
issues involved will not be served by any such 
" victories " as closed any war of the past ; 
that we, with our Allies, have to destroy not 
only a visible world of evil but the whole 
unspeakable system of thought that begot 
and engineers it. This we have learned as we 
have learned everything else in our history, 
by direct experience, each man for himself, 
often in the teeth of preconceived opinion. 
Our knowledge is being put into practice 
with the weight of the whole people behind 
it, and none can foretell how far the 
momentum of that mass will drive. M. 
Chevrillon hints that had the enemy done 
other than he has done, observed, for in- 
stance, some measure of decency in his deal- 
ings or thrown even a gloss of words over 
them, England might have put out less than 
her full strength, and eventually, perhaps, 
have come to some accommodation with him. 
Myself, I think this would only have slowed 



PREFACE xvii 

the war a little ; but that question has been 
settled for us by the enemy's choice of 
methods, so that our present temper bears as 
little relation to the temper in which we 
entered the war as it will bear to the temper 
in which we shall close our account. 

It will be profoundly interesting to read, 
when it comes to be written, M. Chevrillon's 
record and judgment of this rebirth. 

RuDYARD Kipling. 



CONTENTS 

PAQB 

Introduction i 

Public Opinion 11 

I. Before the war — Politics of the Radical Party — ^Atten- 

tion of the country concentrated on internal reforma, 
p. 1 — The pacifist illusion, p. 13 — The German threat, 
p. 14 — ^The prophets, p. 18 — Reasons of their failure — 
English lack of imagination — General opposition to 
conscription, p. 20 — German intrigues — The reigning 
idealism, p. 24 — The crisis — ^Uncertainty of pubHc 
opinion and embarrassment of the Government — The 
delays, p. 29 — Conscientious reasons which decide Eng- 
land to make war, p. 34. 

II. Since the declaration of war — The English conception 

of war — ^The point of view of the gentleman and sports- 
man, p. 39 — Effect produced by the German atrocities, 
p. 44 - -By the publication of works on the German 
philosophy of war, p. 46 — By the manifestations of 
German hatred and frenzy, p. 48 — By the Zeppelin and 
submarine raids, p. 52 — Germany the Devil — The war 
becomes a crusade, p. 63. 

The Illusion of Safety 57 

I. The town — The sensation of power, p. 58. 

II. The country — ^The sensation of assured order and peace, 

p. 61. 

The Appeal to Conscience 73 

I. Greneral principles of the method followed in the recruit- 

ing of the new armies — The idea of self-government, 
p. 73 — Its origin and religious and political significance, 
p. 79. 

II. The propaganda — Analogy with Protestant revivalist 

methods — It appeals to conscience — What is my duty ? 
p. 84 — Commercial methods of the propaganda, p. 95 
— Astonishing and enthusiastic response to the appeal, 
p. 101. 



XX CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Men 103 

Origin, spirit and appearance of the new armies, p. 103 — 
Intense, secret, moral sentiment concealed by the con- 
ventional attitude of carelessness, p. 105 — Empirical 
and traditional nature of their organisation, p. 116 — 
They represent the whole nation — The voluntary move- 
ment reaches its limits, p. 119. 

The Need of Adaptation 122 

I. Sophistry of the German theory which estimates the 

vitality of a people in terms of its military power — 
Military weakness of England in August 1914, p. 122 
— Failure of the War Office becomes apparent in the 
spring of 1916, p. 125. 

II. The Munitions Crisis, p. 127 — ^The philosophy of " mud- 

dling through," p. 132 — Lack of training of the leading 
English politicians for the management of a war, p. 136 
— Impatience in France— The difficulties to be overcome, 
p. 142. 

III. Necessity of stirring up public opinion — The Munitions 
Scandal does it. It could not take place earlier, p. 147. 

Adaptation 153 

I. Rapid development of the new idea — Successive measures 

of organisation, p. 163. 

II. Resistance of certain sections of the advanced parties 

— This resistance a contradiction of the principle of 
State control advocated by these parties. The Socialists 
and Colleotivists become champions of the liberties of 
the individual and the old traditions of England — 
National War and Glass War, p. 158 — The Christian 
Pacifists — The leaders alone remain irreconcilable, p. 163. 

III. The workmen — Their slowness in understanding the 
nature of the war — The most conscientious have gone 
to the army, p. 171 — Strikes and Trade Union rules, 
p. 174 — Intervention of Mr. Lloyd George, p. 177 — 
Progress in the working class of the idea of military 
duty — The Merthjrr Election and its meaning, p. 179. 

IV. Conscription — Becomes probable in the autumn — 
Efforts of the Labour leaders to avoid it by accelerat- 
ing recruiting, p. 181 — The injustice and practical 
drawbacks of the Voluntary System become apparent, 
p. 184 — The advocates of conscription appeal to historical 
precedents, p. 188 — Gradual deterioration of the Volun- 
tary System — The principle at last reduced to a mere 
word, p. 189 — Lord Derby's Scheme — Voluntary com- 



XXI 



CONTENTS 



pulsory service, p. 192 — Details of the scheme — The 
National Register and the Canvass — The eligible men 
subjected to pressure by State Departments and public 
opinion, p. 194 — Characteristically English nature of the 
solution, p. 199. 

V. Adaptation to environment requires time — It must spring 
from the collective will and effort of the whole nation, 
p. 200 — English principles which command this will 
and eflEort — Conflict between the old individualistic ideals 
and the modern despotism of public opinion, p. 204. 

To-Day and To-Morrow 206 

English force of habit and imperviousness to new ideas — 
Extreme difficulty of the transformation required — 
The difficulty overcome by the national habits of volun- 
tary effort and self-discipline, p. 206 — ^The miHtary 
machine is being put together — Energies of the nation 
gradually converging to one point, p. 211 — New con- 
ceptions and probable changes in the individual, the 
nation, and the Empire, p. 213 — Force and tenacity 
of the combative instincts of the English when roused — 
They are to-day inspired by a religious idea — Effect of 
this fundamental factor on the issue of the war, p. 218. 

Appendices 221 

Index . . . ; 233 



BRITAIN AND THE WAR 



INTRODUCTION 

Of all the circumstances of the war in which the 
destiny of the chief nations of the world, and no 
doubt of humanity itself, is at stake, the most 
astonishing, perhaps, to posterity, will be the failure 
of all the nations which Germany intended to 
attack, to foresee the event. That Europe, on the 
eve and during the early stages of the French 
Revolution, did not foresee the eruption which 
for the space of twenty years submerged her 
in its fiery flood, is not difficult to understand : 
that revolution was an incalculable cataclysm, 
bringing in its train an infinite series of inevitable 
results that sprang from no concerted plan. But 
for the lightning attack which was to cast the 
continent and then the world at her feet, Germany 
had long been preparing her plans, her armies 
and weapons, and this without any concealment. 
Publicists, leaders of naval and colonial leagues, 
military writers, professors, and even theologians 
proclaimed or justified her ambition, demonstrating 
the right of war and of force, and investigating 
ways and means. Immediately after the Agadir 
affair the newspapers, which only say what the 



2 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

Government desires, began to utter threats; and 
for years past it has been quite clear that they 
have been occupied in stirring up against the 
Triple Entente, and especially against England, 
hatred and contempt. Towards Russia on the 
question of the small Slavonic nations, towards 
France in the matter of Morocco, Austro-German 
policy has been aggressive. Each time the attempt 
was made to win a position or to inflict an affront 
merely by the threat of the sword, and the attempt 
was successful. In the Reichstag the leaders of 
three great parties gave violent expression to their 
hostility towards England, and the Crown Prince 
had been seen to attend the sitting in order to 
applaud them publicly. Not only did Germany 
reject sarcastically every proposal of disarmament, 
but to the burdens of a military establishment 
already formidable and superior to that of France, 
and of a navy quite useless if it were not intended 
one day to defy the maritime power of England, 
she added fresh and mighty armaments. That 
so much force and will to conquer should have 
been visibly accumulated against the two great 
nations of the West, and that, meanwhile, the one 
should have remained absorbed in party quarrels 
springing from metaphysical disputes (one of our 
ministers went, a few years ago, to the very root 
of the discussion, when he declared in a public 
speech "that miracles do not exist"); that the 
other, led by idealists blind to reality and to 
the signs of the outer world, should have con- 
centrated all thoughts and efforts on a programme 
of constitutional reforms and social legislation 



INTRODUCTION 3 

which the party in power hoped to finance at 
the expense of the mihtary resources of the 
country — in a word, that the first flash of the 
rising storm should have illuminated a France 
absorbed in the Caillaux trial, and an England on 
the eve of the civil war towards which she was being 
led by her pacifists, these are facts which future 
generations will probably think scarcely credible. 

France, at least, having once had experience of 
the danger, retained some idea of it. She possessed 
a weapon of defence which she kept in fairly good 
order in accordance with her traditions and adminis- 
trative routine, without making it the main object of 
her efforts and thoughts. She had even, in order to 
set a good example, begun to diminish at the same 
time its power and its expense. But, in the face of 
the last sudden and decisive increase of the German 
army she had been forced to return (every one 
knows how reluctantly, and what an interminable 
discussion there was about it) to the Three Years' 
Service. Against the sudden attack by which the 
Germans hoped to establish themselves opposite her 
coast, and to point a dagger at her heart, England 
had made no preparations. Not envying or hating 
any one, she had no suspicion of the hatred and 
envy of Germany. It seemed to her incredible 
that a neighbouring people, whom she thought she 
knew, and who appeared very similar to herself, 
could take it into its head, in the twentieth century, 
to draw the political map of the world afresh. The 
division of the world was a settled matter : all that 
remained was for each nation to organise her 



4 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

share of the world for the reign of justice, happi- 
ness and enhghtenment. The Radical Government 
existed only to maintain order and peace by 
democratic methods; that was the primary and 
essential end of its being. Mr. Asquith's cabinet 
was a continuation of that of Sir Henry Campbell - 
Bannerman, which sprang from the reaction 
against the Boer War. So opposed were the 
Radicals to Imperialist and Militarist ideals that 
they were called "Little Englanders." They 
began by restoring to the Boers almost every- 
thing which the war had taken from them : 
in a word, the chief power in South Africa. To- 
wards Germany, which kept on increasing her 
navy and whose alarms and excursions periodi- 
cally filled Europe with trepidation, this party, 
the party in power, made repeated advances. 
The Entente was displeasing to the Germans : it 
endeavoured to reduce the meaning and the import 
of the Entente. Several times over, its leaders, 
who formed the Government, attempted to dis- 
arm Germany morally by beginning to disarm 
England materially. They believed for a long 
time that to propose a Hague Conference was an 
efficient reply to each hostile movement. The 
only thing, according to these pacifists, was to 
convert Germany to pacifism. It is the very irony 
of fate that humanitarians, fervent believers in 
democracy, men like Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd 
George and Sir Edward Grey, of whom it is as 
certain as of Jaures that they stood specially for 
the lofty ideals of peace and social progress, should 
have found themselves all at once burdened with 



INTRODUCTION 5 

the conduct of the most terrible war in history; 
that the men of the budget of 1910, the champions 
of the people against the Lords, the authors of a 
legislation tending towards socialism, the defenders 
of Free Trade, the opponents of ImperiaHsm should 
now be busy extracting from their country the 
greatest powers possible for destruction, block- 
ading and starving Germany, and, in a word, 
that it should now be the special function of a 
Lloyd George to manufacture man-slaughtering 
machines. And it is another irony that sixty-five 
million Germans should be firmly convinced that 
these pure idealists were slyly wishing and pre- 
paring for war, and that a Sir Edward Grey was a 
gaunt Mephistopheles inciting to murder, in the 
service of a grabbing England who dreamt only 
of defending her trade. In the face of such dis- 
tortions of the real it seems as though nations 
were led by dreams; and when it is recognised 
how blind to the real were both our rationalists 
and those of England, one cannot but wonder 
whether rationalism itself is not also a kind of 
dream. This, perhaps, is the most fundamental 
lesson of the war. Once again, it reveals what 
all history teaches ; the omnipotence of the irra- 
tional, the incalculable forces which lie latent 
whilst the daily order, the usual peacefulness of 
things seems established for ever, but whose 
sudden awakening, whose terrific explosion, changes 
for a new period the face of the world. Because 
Germany has long been pregnant with the war, be- 
cause morally and mechanically she has prepared 
for it, a study bearing the title Germany and 



6 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

the War would be the history of a deUberate 
will, aiming at realisation, and previous, there- 
fore, to the war. It would be necessary, in order 
to write it, to go far beyond the present event, 
to go back to 1813 and 1806, perhaps even to the 
first kings and to the very origins of Prussia ; and 
by the time the beginning of the war would be 
reached, the essential would have been told. 

Because on the contrary England did not want 
war, because it was forced on her, a study of 
England and the war is mainly the history of the 
reactions of this people to the accomplished fact. 
No doubt it is necessary to glance at previous 
history, but what we then have to note is what 
is lacking : previous history consists of negatives : 
England did not foresee . . . England was not 
anxious . . . England did not prepare. . . . 
Positive history only begins at the end of July 
1914. Then does this country awake to the 
danger, then does she discover her enemy, and 
gradually she changes her habits, she gathers her- 
self together, she adapts herself to the new circum- 
stances and she arms. 

Another difference between these two studies 
would correspond to the essential psychological 
differences between the two nations. In order to 
understand the German meaning of the war books 
alone are almost sufficient. Everything was worked 
out, everything was written down beforehand : 
Treitschke, Bernhardi, Von der Goltz, the publi- 
cations of the Pan- Germans, the manual of the 
customs of war, state the reasons, the object, the 
methods. The whole idea is there, defined in 



INTRODUCTION 7 

every detail, from the enthusiastic memories of the 
Holy Roman Empire down to the scheme of a 
future European Federation under the hegemony of 
Germany, from the argument of the superiority of 
race and its mystic influence down to the plan 
of attack with its flanking movement through 
western Flanders, and its pivot in Lorraine, from 
the thesis which declares morality and treaties 
subordinate to the absolute power of the State, 
to that which makes " f rightfulness " a legitimate 
military principle. The reason is that, as we have 
long known, in Germany everything first exists 
theoretically; the ideal is first set up clear and 
complete, directing deductively the patient will 
which then works to force, bit by bit, the real 
into the required form. Hence the German scorn 
for the real which — even when it is a question of 
" colonising " part of France and first " empty- 
ing " it — even when it is a question of cutting up 
and then piecing Europe together again like a 
mere Congo State, and finally of upsetting the 
British Empire — ^they affect to regard with scorn, 
as mere matter, which can be compelled to assume 
the preconceived shape. However, it is not 
always sufficient merely to accumulate force in 
order to manipulate objects of such magnitude : 
it may be important first of all to have formed 
an accurate estimate of them. The German idea, 
inflamed with pride and passion, hides reality from 
sight and blots it out : we now know the England 
which the German professors have invented in the 
place of the real England. And we have heard 
also of the animal which one of them once evolved 



8 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

out of his own inner consciousness. The German 
metaphysical camel has now revealed itself as 
a calamity for the whole world. It seems likely 
this time to be one for Germany too. 

No intellectual process could be more totally 
opposed to this than the one which is natural to 
Germany's English cousins. In England thought 
works on empirical and inductive lines : reality 
engenders and controls the ideal; the latter is 
not the theoretic simplification of the former, 
often distorting it out of all resemblance under 
the pretence of abstracting its essential nature 
and making it clearer. Thought repeats reality 
bit by bit, with every feature of its visible and 
living nature, and with all its contingent and com- 
plex diversity. And similarly the English will is, 
above all, a power of adaptation to this reality : 
an adaptation which takes place only by degrees, 
which is modest because patient, often discon- 
tinuous, corrected gradually under the continual 
teaching of circumstances, and which is per- 
sistently pursued through all obstacles and in 
spite of all disappointments. This is the history 
of England's present effort, and it is the whole 
history of this nation, of its growth, of its ex- 
tension over the planet, of its successes, of its 
miraculous Empire, which the Germans affect to 
despise as incoherent, decaying, incapable of sur- 
vival, because so great a success has sprung from 
a principle which is the very opposite of their own, 
not from a central and creative a priori idea, but, 
according to them, from accident, from luck — 
because this Empire has been built no one knows 



INTRODUCTION 9 

exactly how, piecemeal, without any systematic 
design, irrationally, so they say, but in reality in 
accordance with the process of life itself. 

A condition of this process is time, and this, 
through good luck which is not altogether un- 
connected with their insular position, has never 
failed the English, not less in this war than 
in other critical moments of their history; but 
this time they really counted on it too much. 
Natural adaptation to environment is slow and, 
moreover, fragmentary; it stops, it starts again : 
now one organ then another is adjusted; new 
armies may spring up, almost as if by magic, before 
factories have been organised for the production 
of arms and munitions. Some invisible psycho- 
logical forces may accelerate the effort, others 
may retard it. Thus the effort and the working 
of the spirit which creates it cannot be studied 
methodically, like the productions of German 
thought and will : there is no theory to be ex- 
amined, no principle to be grasped and then 
followed out in its necessary and mutually con- 
nected developments. Here it is a question of 
observing the answer of a certain organism to 
the external danger which threatens it. In order 
to understand and explain it nothing more is 
required than to proceed in the simple English 
fashion, by observation and narration, noting 
actions and reactions, following many roads, but 
first referring to the past — a very recent past — 
in order to see the necessity arise and the first 
efforts at adaptation. Almost at once, in the 
external phenomena as in the most hidden causes, 



10 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

a remarkable element is noticeable, which can be 
isolated but scarcely defined, and which colours with 
a quite peculiar tint all the threads of this history 
— ^that is, as it were, a certain universal and en- 
tirely spiritual characteristic which seems to be 
the very essence of England. Such a study leads 
one into the deeper psychology of a nation. It 
is the special feature of this war that the nations 
engaged in it — ^nations which, viewed superficially, 
seem to belong to the same civilisation — reveal 
as never before, their secret and absolute differences. 

February 1916, 



PUBLIC OPINION 

In London, in June 1915, in those streets which 
are as busy as ever, where the only sign of war is 
the number of men in khaki, it seemed as if 
some moments of the past were rising once more : 
Mafeking night, the Coronation of Edward VII, his 
funeral, the agitations for and against the House of 
Lords, for and against Mr. Lloyd George's famous 
budget. How could one fail to think of it? 
Under such similar appearances I knew that life 
had been revolutionised, all its rhythms, all its 
landmarks and tendencies altered by one engross- 
ing idea, by an effort which was beginning to 
draw into itself all the forces of the country. 
One's mind was ever looking backward, seeking 
the mistakes, the neglected signs, and wondering 
how the surprise had come about. 

At Westminster, on the Embankment, along 
which I often passed, the picturesque uproar of 
bands, picture posters and recruiting speeches re- 
minded me forcibly of the merry din of trumpets, 
bills and election harangues in 1910. The same 
spirit was revealed in both — a naive, boyish, ener- 
getic spirit, in love with bright and glaring colours, 
but also with sentiment and morality — a spirit so 
very serious in its depths. At that period, this 

11 



12 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

nation, whose movements are ever behind those 
of the rest of the world, and which adapts itself to 
outer changes only under the pressure of events 
(it still reckons by ounces, inches and farthings), 
this great nation was passing, after 1832, after 
1867 and 1884, through a new stage of its revo- 
lution. With the Boer War the national mind 
had completed one of its long periodical oscilla- 
tions. From the dream of Imperialism which 
Kipling had sung, together with the strength, the 
conscience and the will power of England, the 
nation was returning to an ideal of justice and 
reason : justice and reason that stand not for one 
nation alone, but for all mankind. Against the fic- 
tions, prejudices, traditions, illogicalities by which 
England strives to maintain her ancient form 
and the ruling class to perpetuate its ascendancy, 
new thinkers, poets, playwrights and novelists, 
a Wells, a Shaw, a Chesterton, a Galsworthy, were 
directing their sarcastic challenges, tearing off all 
the veils, urging and compelling their countrymen 
to look through and beyond the old English con- 
ventions at the face of truth, of all truths, and 
especially at the hidden and seamy side of society 
and life from which they strive, both by instinct 
and systematically, to turn away their eyes. This 
general spiritual movement was having an effect 
on practical affairs, inspiring a prolonged effort 
in the direction of political and social reform. A 
new system of taxation had been introduced, the 
purpose of which was not only to put the burden on 
acquired wealth, but to deprive the rich of the 
monopoly of a land which they keep almost 



PUBLIC OPINION . 13 

empty, and to re-people the country. The power 
of the Lords was restricted, they were reduced 
to the state of supernumeraries, Hke so many 
of the coronation dignitaries who remain but as 
memories of a romantic past : one might almost 
say that a single-chamber government was estab- 
lished. Payment of members, abolition of the 
plural vote, which favours the wealthy, aboli- 
tion of the privileges of the Anglican Church in 
Wales, Home Rule for Ireland, and then exten- 
sion of the same principle to other parts of the 
kingdom (there was even a talk of going back to 
the Heptarchy), social legislation, old age pensions, 
compulsory insurance, reduction of the number 
of public houses, purchase and division of the 
land by the State in order to encourage small 
proprietors — such are the main items of the pro- 
gramme the discussion of which absorbed the 
attention of the country, and which the govern- 
ments, idealist and pacifist in their tendency, of 
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Mr. Asquith 
had begun to put into practice. 

The Conservatives had no doubt in 1910 talked 
of the German danger, but only to defend against 
the Radicals the old English tradition of naval 
supremacy. It was but a party argument, for 
they were no more inclined than their political 
opponents to risk unpopularity by proposing con- 
scription. When, in 1912, Lord Roberts deli- 
vered, at Manchester, the first of his great speeches 
in favour of universal mihtary service, Unionists 
and Liberals alike condemned his campaign as 
futile and dangerous. On the whole, since all 



14 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

the activity of the Government was concentrated 
on home affairs, it was towards the discussion of 
these affairs and the defence of their own favourite 
remedies — protection, the referendum, the reform, 
and not the degradation, of the Upper House — ^that 
the Opposition directed all its efforts. On both 
sides alike there was a tacit agreement that with 
the Boer War three centuries of territorial expan- 
sion had come to an end, that the Empire was 
finished, and that England had nothing more to 
do than to administer and improve her estate, to 
eliminate from it, as far as possible, injustice and 
suffering, and to organise society for the greater 
welfare of future generations. 

At the same time, coming from the Continent, 
and strengthened amongst the Wesleyans and 
Methodists by religious conviction and zeal, was 
spreading, together with the dream of a new social 
organisation, the idea of international brother- 
hood and of everlasting peace between the nations. 
No doubt there were pessimists who saw and de- 
nounced Germany as a jealous and threatening 
rival. For all that, the " Liberal," democratic, 
and therefore dominant idea was that two great 
Christian and industrial nations, that stood before 
the world for the same civilisation, could not fail to 
come to an understanding, and that their working 
masses, in spite of all political differences, were sure 
to make common cause in defence of their class 
interests. It was sufficient, in order to dispel all 
risk of quarrel, to send conducted tours of English 
trade unionists for trips on the banks of the 



PUBLIC OPINION 15 

Rhine or the Spree : in the genial warmth of 
after-dinner speeches the ancient scales of dis- 
trust and prejudice would fall from every eye, 
and the men of both countries would recognise 
each other as brothers. Between two rival manu- 
facturing countries, all that was necessary was 
to come to an agreement by mutual concessions 
and division of markets. In spite of the curious 
obstinacy of Germany in developing her navy, 
illusions such as these guided the responsible 
rulers of the country. Sir Henry Campbell-Banner- 
man's Government tried at first to win the favour 
of the German Sphinx by suspending building in 
the Government dockyards for a year; and down 
to 1912 the same Cabinet, and afterwards that of 
Mr. Asquith, repeatedly made proposals for inter- 
national arbitration and disarmament. Even in 
1913, with regard to Turkish affairs (Treaty of 
London and reoccupation of Adrianople), with 
regard to the Bagdad railway, with regard to the 
possible purchase of Portuguese colonies by the 
Germans, Sir Edward Grey showed his good- will. 

In fact, the further the reign of Edward VII 
was left behind, the more did the policy of this 
minister reduce itself to making concessions in- 
tended to secure peace. The previous year, at 
a hint from the Kaiser, Lord Haldane, a scholar 
and philosopher, who only saw in Germany the 
Heidelberg of his youth, and spoke of it as his 
" spiritual home," had been to Berlin. We know 
now what proposals were there made to him : Mr. 
Asquith, since the development of events, has 
told us with the expression of outraged honesty. 



16 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

It seems that Germany offered to slacken the pace 
of her naval development, on condition that she 
was given a free hand on the Continent. On the 
worthy gentlemen this proposal, with its scarcely 
veiled cynicism, this unexpected manifestation of 
primitive nature, seems to have produced an in- 
dehble impression. ^ Under the mask of civiHsa- 
tion which had until then deceived them, they sud- 
denly perceived the pirate preparing his coup. They 
kept this revelation to themselves, and again set 
about, with what anxiety and presentiments may 
be imagined, their work of domestic reform. 

For ten years past sudden demonstrations had re- 
vealed the greed and impatience of Germany. In 
the first place, the rapid growth of a navy the real 
intention of which — ^the challenge to England for her 
place in the world — soon ceased to be concealed. 
In 1905 came the first rattling of the sword : Alge- 
ciras, which was an ultimatum, of which England 
good-naturedly tried to veil the disquieting effects, 
by cutting down her naval programme and after- 
wards reducing her regular army (1906); but to 
this Germany replied just as she had done to the 
French law, which reduced military service to two 
years, by increasing her armaments. Then came 
other scares : the Bosnian affair, the humiliation of 
which Russia swallowed in silence; the Kaiser's 
speech on "the shining armour"; the demonstra- 
tion at Agadir following close upon the ironical 
refusal to entertain proposals of disarmament and 
" naval holidays " ; and then, in 1912, the fiasco of 
Lord Haldane's mission to BerHn. Finally, in the 
1 Speech by Mr. Asquith at Cardiff, October 2, 1914. 



PUBLIC OPINION 17 

same year, and still more in 1913, the enormous 
increase of the German army by means of special 
war taxes that raised a thousand million francs. 
No doubt the Radical Government saw the coming 
menace; not only did it see it, but it faced it, 
during the Agadir crisis, when, since honour re- 
quired it, both Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith 
spoke so plainly. But to England herself they 
did not speak with the same resolution. Not a 
word to the country of military requirements. 
No doubt everything was done to keep the navy 
ahead of its rival ; in this direction there were no 
difficulties : naval supremacy is a tradition of the 
British people, which respects tradition so strongly ; 
to maintain it the Englishman is accustomed to 
make sacrifices. The reorganisation by Lord Hal- 
dane of the old militia, which was now known as 
the Reserve, and the creation of the Territorial 
Army, had, of course, taken place. These measures 
were applauded, for they dealt but with volunteer 
and almost independent bodies, simple rifle clubs, 
training each year for a few weeks only. There 
was little new about them except the names. But 
universal military service would have been a real 
innovation of foreign origin, a " continental " in- 
vention, like the motor-car, the submarine and the 
aeroplane, which our English friends were slow to 
take up, like the Channel Tunnel, the idea of which 
has been rejected by the succeeding Cabinets of 
both parties. Not only did the Liberal Government, 
aware as it was of German hankerings, do nothing 
to prepare the country for the great measure which 
was necessary, it even opposed it. Mr. Asquith met 



18 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

the proposals of the "League for Conscription" 
with refusal; the party journals overwhelmed 
the apostles of the new idea with sarcasm ; worst 
of all, these papers started a set campaign to 
prove that Germany was pacifist, whilst they de- 
nounced the " war panickers " and declared that, 
if the worst came to the worst, the navy was 
sufficient to meet any foreign attack. 

Prophets, however, had risen to warn the 
people both of the growing danger and of the 
only efficient defence against it. At their head 
was Lord Roberts, that fine old soldier, with 
the strong and refined face, who for seven years 
devoted himself to this task, at the age of 
seventy-six facing crowds, transforming himself 
into a political agitator, an organiser of meet- 
ings, a great orator, and with clear foresight 
summing all up in the epigram : " Germany 
strikes when Germany's hour has struck." Be- 
hind him came others, men of every origin and 
of every party : a great poet like Kipling, mystics 
and militant Socialists like Stead and Blatchford, 
journalists and professors like Frederic and 
Austin Harrison, Maxse, Cramb, Sarolea, who 
knew their Germany and for years past had seen 
in the clearest light her intentions and manoeuvres. 
Mr. Maxse, the editor of the National Review, 
could talk of nothing else, to such an extent that 
his " one idea " became an object of mockery (he 
has recently collected his articles under the ironical 
title of Germany on the Brain). In vain did all 
these point to the growth of German will and 



PUBLIC OPINION 19 

power, both alike directed to one essential and 
final aim : the dispossession of England. In vain, 
quoting the Berlin professors, did they prove the 
hatred existing in Germany, and demonstrate its 
deeper and inevitable causes : the irrepressible 
tendency of a nation growing at an immoderate 
rate and mistaking its appetite for a mission, to 
rise above all others and take up constantly more 
of the planet's surface ; — a tendency thwarted by 
the presence on every continent of another nation 
which, whilst refusing to take the trouble to arm 
and scorning the restraints and slavery of mili- 
tarism, claims — such is the German argument — 
by virtue of its superior right, of its privileges as 
an old nation, a nation of " gentlemen," that is 
to say, an aged and already decadent nation — ^to 
retain indefinitely the command of the sea, every 
colony, every market, every cable, every port of 
call, every naval base, the whole, in fact, of its 
matchless empire won, not by the superior virtue 
of a methodic plan, of an organising and conquer- 
ing theory, but by an incoherent series of chances, 
adventures, stratagems, and piratical raids. In 
vain did they demonstrate that the navy was no 
longer a sufficient defence against such threaten- 
ing greed, backed up by so strong a will and such 
formidable means, for the enemy would strive at 
once to become master of the Continent, and 
once in possession of the " counter-scarp of 
Flanders " and of all the resources of France, 
would soon have a fleet superior to any which 
England could build, and then launch a victorious 
attack simultaneously from Calais, Cherbourg, 



20 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

Antwerp, Rotterdam and Cuxhaven. In vain did 
they point, in conclusion, to the sole means of 
defence — power to stop the first step of Germany 
on the road to Flanders and France — sufficient 
power to make her understand that she could be 
opposed on the Continent; in a word, the crea- 
tion of an army on the continental scale. By 
adopting conscription, they said, war would be 
avoided. 

Such was, indeed, the logical conclusion, but 
in England logic is devoid of prestige. More- 
over, in all countries, to stir up men to great 
sacrifices, argument avails but little; the stimulus 
of sentiment and of passion is required, or else 
the experience of pressing necessity and even of 
misfortune. Now, the German peril created no 
alarm ; a specialist here and there might calculate 
it just as astronomers by their equations may 
predict a collision between planets. The great 
public had not that immediate sight of it which 
is expressed by the English verb to realise, and 
which alone could rouse the English mind, a mind 
impervious to all but facts of concrete experience, 
to the necessity of action. Sentiment and pas- 
sion were concentrating more and more on the 
affairs of Ireland. About July 20th, 1914, all 
London was, indeed, talking of war, it was even 
talking of nothing else; but it was of war in 
Ulster, an inevitable war, so it seemed, growing 
out of historic prejudices and grudges, bringing 
into collision two parties each of which had a 
distorted vision of the other, but a vision highly 



PUBLIC OPINION 21 

coloured, charged with sentiment, and hence full 
of life and power to excite fanaticism. By the 
side of these visions of civil war, what was this 
possibility of a German war? An abstract idea, 
all the more superficial and foreign to the organ- 
ised and real self of the nation because it was 
new : England until then had never known 
Germany as an enemy, the Englishman never 
having seen in the German anything but the 
too diligent clerk, of quiet and respectable 
habits, who was a member of his football club, 
or the inevitable waiter with his well-oiled hair, 
his stiff manners, and his black coat verging on 
green, who attended on him at his restaurant. 
Scorned by the Government, slighted by the 
Opposition, the ideas of Lord Roberts and his 
League had no weight in the political life of the 
country. " Fads," no doubt, like those which 
start vegetarian leagues, anti-vaccination societies 
and the like, which are incessantly springing up 
in England — fads which are only to be met with 
the smile of tolerance. 

And not only did the forces of sentiment fail 
to move in the direction of the great measure of 
defence; the very mention of conscription roused 
a strongly hostile sentiment. The old distrust 
which the Commons of England had of the 
military forces of the king were awakened ; misty 
but deeply rooted memories of centuries of strife 
between nation and monarch, of the Revolution, 
of Cromwell, perhaps of Magna Charta itself. 
To this day the permission of the chief of the 
merchant guilds, of the Lord Mayor of the city, 



22 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

is required before armed troops may cross the 
threshold of the ancient township. To this day 
the consent of ParHament is necessary to legahse 
the proceedings of mihtary tribunals, and must 
be renewed every year. And even when thus 
authorised, they are held to be nothing more 
than the domestic discipline of a private society or 
" club," as the writer was once told by a well- 
known English barrister in connection with the 
Dreyfus affair, the soldier always remaining a 
citizen, subject to the jurisdiction, for every 
crime and misdemeanour, of a jury and a civil 
judge ; and even to-day no soldier, whatever may 
be the orders of his officers, is exempted from this 
jurisdiction. Add to all this the ancient contempt 
in which the military were held (it was expressed 
not so very long ago by this inscription on the 
doors of certain taverns : "Soldiers not admitted "), 
the old middle-class, commercial, puritan, noncon- 
formist prejudice against the red-coats, against 
troops which for centuries were mostly recruited 
in drinking bars from the ranks of ne'er do wells 
and loafers.^ 

Above all, the proud idea prevailed that the 
Englishman alone is a free man, that he is so not 
by some philosophic fiction, not by the deceptive 
appearance of a theoretic formula inscribed one 
fine day on all public buildings, but really and 
actually, as a positive result of a struggle that has 
lasted now nearly a thousand years, because, 

^ In a pamplalet of the recruiting propaganda this sentence 
appeared : " You must recognise, in the first place, that it is not 
a sin to be a soldier." 



PUBLIC OPINION 23 

through all these centuries, he has won and 
thoroughly assimilated his liberties, of which the 
first, the most fundamental, the right to dispose 
of his own person and of his time, is formulated in 
the old law of Habeas Corpus, It was with refer- 
ence to the opposition between this essential liberty 
and conscription that a member of the Upper 
House, Lord Dysart, publicly asked the other day 
in the Daily Chronicle : " Can a slave be a free 
man?" Every act of an Englishman who has 
not, as a criminal, forfeited his rights as a citizen 
must be voluntary; of his own free will only 
should he surrender his person and his time. 
To tamper with this principle, with this consti- 
tutional tradition of the " kingdom," with this 
privilege of Englishmen, would be an offence not 
only against the " spirit of the Constitution," but 
against English self-respect itself. As to any im- 
mediate danger, as to the necessity of taking part 
in a continental war : little does the great pubhc 
care about the " counter-scarp of Flanders." 
Guarded by the navy, the old moats of the 
Channel and the North Sea have never been 
crossed, and the wisdom of England is to trust 
only in precedents. But to suppose the impossible, 
should the country ever be really threatened — 
w^ell then, all Englishmen would rise to throw the 
invader back into the sea : at the very least three 
million volunteers. Now, an Englishman has always 
equalled several foreigners, and one volunteer, by 
reason of his superior virtue, is worth several slave 
conscripts on the battlefield. A lawyer and states- 
man, Sir John Simon, accustomed to weigh his 



24 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

words, has been able to measure this superiority 
exactly : it is in the ratio of three to one ; and a 
speeiaHst, a soldier, a former Secretary for War, 
Colonel Seely, taking both qualities, that of EngUsh- 
man and that of volunteer into account, has defined 
it as ten to one. In the first case — and these figures 
have been seriously given and pubhshed ^ — nine 
million Germans, and in the second case thirty 
milHon, would be required to fight on a footing 
of equality three milKon Englishmen, raised on 
the spur of the moment to defend their country. 
Such convictions gave encouragement to another 
idea, very powerful in a Puritan country in which, 
moral values taking precedence of all others, both 
individual and national pride has long maintained 
itself on an assurance of superior virtue : the idea 
that whilst compulsion is necessary to raise the 
armies of other lands, it would be magnificent that 
the spontaneous impulse of its men should be 
sufficient to defend England. 

To these illusions and prejudices which pre- 
vented England from immediately adapting her- 
self to meet the danger, another and very different 
cause of delay was added from without : the 
secret work of the enemy, carried on for three 
years to blind the nation to the danger. Mr. 
Wickham Steed has described the attempt ^ : so 
great was its success, that our neighbours were in 
1914 less prepared than in 1911 to face Germany 

^ Speech by Colonel Seely at Heanor, April 26, 1913, and by 
Sir John Simon at Ashton-mider-Lyne, November 21, 1914. 
^ See the Revue de Paris for June 1, 1915. 



PUBLIC OPINION 25 

on the Continent. At the height of the Agadir 
crisis they had not hesitated, and the firm bear- 
ing, the clear words of Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd 
George had amazed the aggressor, now ready to 
spring. It will be remembered to what bargaining 
Germany was then reduced, what was seen of her 
seething anger and disappointed greed. But her 
will to dominate persisted : the only thing was 
to begin again, with fresh precautions, and with 
sufficient time to increase the forces which had 
not frightened France, and to get rid of England's 
opposition, which had just been experienced in 
so humiliating a fashion. With this end in view 
two series of parallel operations, conducted, how- 
ever, in opposite directions, were started ; the 
military laws of 1912 and 1913, and the demon- 
strations of friendship combined with the pacifist 
propaganda in England, of Baron Marschall von 
Bieberstein and Prince Lichnowsky. For the real 
object of their missions was to lull British ap- 
prehensions, and, above all, to work upon and 
win over the great Radical party, which, having 
naturally a horror of war, and still more of the 
only preventive remedy against war, conscription, 
already showed reluctance to believe in the danger. 
The work of the German emissaries is well known, 
their flatteries, their secret, prolonged and successful 
influence over the leading journals of the party in 
power : the Daily News, the Manchester Guardian, 
the Westminster Gazette, the Daily Chronicle, and 
through these over the great nonconformist public 
of the working and lower middle-classes whose 
opinion rules the country and decides elections. 



26 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

Of course English newspapers are not to be 
bought, but journahsts can be circumvented : 
Herr von Kuhlmann can have them invited to the 
embassy ; Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, who was 
specially selected for his tactful and ingratiating 
qualities, Prince Lichnowsky, who really seems 
never to have been acquainted with the secret 
aim of German policy, and whose sincerity was 
used as a tool by his Government, can talk 
to them their favourite language : two great 
manufacturing nations should go hand in hand; 
Germany wants nothing but peace; the only 
thing is to arrange an entente with her, especially 
not to arrange an entente against her, and, above 
all, not to threaten her with armaments such as 
those recommended by Lord Roberts; the inter- 
vention of England in the recent crisis in Morocco 
was an insolent and dangerous challenge to the 
great German democracy. With such arguments 
Radical sentiments already harmonised. It is an 
old tradition of the party that all increase of the 
army and all alliance with the foreigner are danger- 
ous, provocative and compromising ; that England 
ought to isolate herself and seek safety in peace 
and the resources of her own Empire. The Daily 
News responded to German suggestions with the 
enthusiasm of a ready-made conviction which 
requires nothing but the signal for action and 
the indication of the point of attack. Against the 
Entente with France the great Radical journal para- 
doxically carried on a campaign, with the same zeal 
and for the same reason as certain French socialist 
papers some time ago attacked the Entente with 



PUBLIC OPINION 27 

England : because such an understanding was dis- 
tasteful to Germany and because the only way to 
secure peace was not to run counter to German 
policy. Like these papers again, but more readily, 
since only foreign interests were in question, at 
every turn of the Morocco crisis the same Daily 
News, following the lead of an impassioned polemist, 
Mr. E. D. Morel, regularly attacked all the French 
contentions, and carried prejudice to such a point 
that, whilst professing to give its readers a detailed 
account of this affair, it made no reference to the 
Franco-German agreement of 1909. This campaign 
was opposed by the Government. They would have 
given much, had offered much — ^too much, no doubt 
— ^to obtain a rapprochement with Germany, but to 
sacrifice for it the friendship with France was a price 
which they were not prepared to pay. For this 
resistance the pacifist press declared Sir Edward 
Grey mainly responsible, and the cry desired by 
the Germans, suggested, no doubt, by them, 
was raised : " Grey must go." Sir Edward Grey 
remained. 

To understand what this campaign was and the 
measure of success which it attained, it must not be 
forgotten that it was inspired by a series of dreams, 
ideas and sentiments of a reKgious order, by a 
purely ideaHstic and Christian faith in a possible 
and coming reign over mankind of peace, jus- 
tice and love. It is not without significance that 
the Daily News belongs to Quakers, by whom the 
command, " Thou shalt not kill," is taken in its 
absolute sense, and who therefore regard war as 



28 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

a state of sin. It is in the most strictly religious 
section of the community, amongst Methodists, 
Baptists and Low Church people, that, throughout 
the nineteenth century. Liberal principles have 
found their chief support ; and if pacifist proposals 
— reduction of armaments, compulsory arbitration, 
limitation of colonial expansion, all that the Tories 
called " Little Englandism " — had also become 
part of the Liberal programme, the reason is that, 
since the evangelical revival at the beginning of 
the last century, the free Churches had vigorously 
spread the dream of peace and goodwill between 
the nations. Of course the Christian idea that 
pride and war are of Satan, whilst humility, meek- 
ness of heart, and justice are of God, is often 
naturally opposed, and sometimes also supported 
by instinct and self-interest ; but, in spite of all, as 
in that other land of mystics, Russia, it is powerful 
and capable of influencing national policy. This was 
plainly seen under the government of Mr. Gladstone, 
whose idealism sprang from a fervent religious 
faith. If he had not been the great Christian 
gentleman he was, would he have dared to make 
peace with the Boers after the English defeat at 
Majuba ? Little he cared about prestige. He was 
inspired by a principle which is the exact reverse 
of that which rules in Germany ; meekness of heart 
and not imponiren — desire for peace and justice and 
not will to power and conquest . An idea of the same 
order was uttered by another idealist, of the same 
Anglo-Saxon and Puritan culture. President Wilson, 
when he said, at the time of his first difficulties 
with Germany in the course of the present war : 



PUBLIC OPINION 29 

"It is possible to be too proud to fight." The 
pride referred to here is the determination not to 
betray an ideal : that ideal common alike to 
rationalist and Christian, at once mystical and 
democratic, which inspires the great transatlantic 
republic to such an extent that, to understand 
the spiritual conditions of nonconformist, industrial 
and radical England, the England of the north 
and the north-west, on the eve of the war, we have 
only to observe how the working-class population 
of the United States reacts to the present events 
— ^that population which is so conscientious but of 
the purely board-school outlook, and which reduces 
problems, the origin and real meaning of which it 
cannot understand, to mere matters of sentiment. 
And after all, in order to predict what would be 
the resistance of one section of opinion, it was 
enough to recall to mind how stubborn had been 
the opposition to the Boer War of an honourable 
minority amongst our neighbours. 

In 1914 war was legitimate on the part of Eng- 
land, since it was resolved upon by Germany 
against the friends of England, and finally, evi- 
dently, through these friends, against England 
herself. But public opinion, especially that of the 
party in power, of the working men and of the 
commercial middle class, had not been prepared. 
Or, rather, it had been prepared, but by Germany 
through her secret or unconscious agents, in a 
direction contrary to the honour and interests of 
England. Hence, when the ambition and the plot 
were suddenly unveiled, when the blow was struck 



30 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

in all its startling enormity, at the moment when 
rapid decision was so important, Sir Edward Grey's 
perplexity, evasions and delays. No doubt Mr. 
Asquith's cabinet clearly saw that sooner or later 
England was bound to come into the war, when 
the duty and vital necessity of intervention finally 
became apparent and imperative to every one. But 
on the historical dates when everything was still 
in the balance, the Government — a party Govern- 
ment based on public opinion — knew that an im- 
portant section of the country, in fact the majority 
of its own party, was unfavourable to intervention. 
Already the Manchester Guardian had begun to 
side for Austria against Servia, and the Daily 
News was denouncing as " dangerous " Sir Edward 
Grey, the minister whom this same journal had 
formally declared " impossible," just as on the 
eve of Algeciras there had been French papers to 
demand the impeachment of M. Delcasse. This 
is indeed what we should remember. In 1905, 
in the face of unforeseen danger and at the 
dictation of Germany, we at once sacrificed our 
minister and submitted to the conference. In 
1914, after three years of German intrigues against 
the minister who remained faithful, in spite of all 
temptations, to the Entente, at the sudden and un- 
foreseen crisis English opinion appeared to waver, 
and the complete and necessary decision was de- 
layed for a week. A quite unavoidable delay, 
for in a self-governing country, whose liberty is 
real, positive and consecrated by long-aged customs, 
a Cabinet has neither the right nor the power 
to decide on war, if the will of the nation is not 



PUBLIC OPINION 31 

behind the Government, and both Mr. Asquith 
and Sir Edward Grey would not have been long 
in learning this. A fatal delay, almost infinite 
in its consequences, for, by a singular irony of 
fate, the act which seemed likely to throw 
England into the conflict, and which down to 
the violation of Belgian neutrality the radical 
pacifists made every effort to prevent, was the 
only one which could have prevented the con- 
flict. And to such an extent is this true that 
now the most artless and shameless of all German 
grievances against Great Britain is that, by her 
incessant attempts for ten years to avoid war, 
she had induced Germany to think that she was 
afraid of it, that she would therefore keep out of 
it at all costs, and so had incited her to war. At 
the very beginning, and several times in the course 
of the crisis, first by M. Sazonoff's plain warn- 
ing, then by the urgent appeals of M. Paleo- 
logue, M. Poincare and M. Paul Cambon to the 
English ambassadors and to Sir Edward Grey, 
Mr. Asquith' s cabinet was informed that there 
was one chance, and one chance only, of avoiding 
the catastrophe, into which, moreover, England 
would inevitably be dragged, and that was that 
England should instantly and resolutely take her 
stand by the side of France and Russia. 

To this solemn and repeated warning, the per- 
spicacity of which has been proved by all the 
subsequent e\ents (and in the first place by 
Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg's panic when Sir 
Edward Goschen at last announced the ultimatum 
to him), is it necessary to recall what was during 



32 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

that memorable week England's sybilline answer ? 
On the 24th nothing but this : She agrees that 
it will be difficult for her to remain neutral if 
war becomes general. On the 25th, w^hen M. 
Sazonoff adds that rivers of blood will flow 
if London stands out, the repugnance to de- 
cisive action, the anxiety to exhibit an illusory 
and nebulous caution, remain the same : it is 
declared that in order that the English effort at 
mediation at Vienna and Berlin may be efficient 
it is necessary that England should present herself 
not as an ally of the enemy, but as a friend, a 
friend who may be converted into an enemy if her 
counsels of moderation are disregarded.^ On the 
27th, after receiving the new, urgent and significant 
message from Russia that Vienna and Berlin are 
counting, whatever happens, upon the neutrality 
of England, Downing Street envelops itself in a 
still thicker fog, a fog in which every object seems 
to lose or, even, blur its outline : it is asserted that 
any such idea on the part of the Austro-German 
group " should be dispelled by the orders given 
to the First Fleet which is concentrated at Port- 
land not to disperse for manoeuvre leave." ^ But 
care is taken to add, in speaking to Russia, that 
this fact promises nothing more than diplomatic 
support, and, in speaking to Austria, that there is 
no threat concealed beneath this fact. On the 
29th the refusal to be bound is more clearly 
stated : M. Cambon and his Government must 
not count on the Agadir precedent, for the dispute 

1 Blue Book, No. 17. ^ jj^,^ ^o. 47. 



PUBLIC OPINION 33 

this time does not arise out of any Franco -English 
agreement; England has not decided her line of 
action, she is free to act or not. But the same 
day Sir Edward warns Prince Lichnowsky that if 
Germany, and then France, should descend into 
the maelstrom it would be a mistake to count 
on the inaction of England. And whilst remaining 
hidden behind these mists, he sees all the time 
clear and far, for, remembering the solemn warning 
which he has received from Russia and France, 
he takes care to guard himself formally against 
the mean accusation which Germany will one day 
cast against him, of having incited her to war, by 
not at once addressing her in threatening terms : 
" I replied " (to the German Ambassador) " . . . . 
that I did not wish to be open to any reproach 
from him that the friendly tone of our conversa- 
tion had misled him or his Government into sup- 
posing that we should not take action, and to the 
reproach that, if they had not been so misled, the 
course of things might have been different." ^ And 
nevertheless, on the 31st again, M. Poincare having 
expressed the opinion that there will be no war 
if England declares herself the ally of France, he 
replies, through Sir Francis Bertie, that " nobody 
here feels that in this dispute, so far as it has yet 
gone, British treaties and rights are involved," and 
that " we cannot undertake a definite pledge to 
intervene in a war." ^ The hesitation is really only 
apparent, and under all the external forms of this 
diplomacy a very definite idea is to be found, and 

1 Blue Book, No. 89. 

* Ibid., No. 116, replying to No. 99. 



34 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

that is a refusal to make a binding engagement 
to intervene; for, in this last week in July, Mr. 
Asquith's cabinet has not yet the right to do so, 
and an act so contrary to a constitution, the essen- 
tial articles of which are not written, would run 
the risk of stirring up a formidable opposition — 
a refusal also to bind oneself not to intervene, 
for Mr. Asquith's cabinet well knows the truth of 
M. Sazonoff's words, and that if in a Franco- 
German war English intervention may take place 
too late, it is none the less certain to take place. 

Certain it is, because England cannot, without 
giving herself up, allow Germany to grow towards 
the west and to approach the sea. And still more 
imperatively so because, in spite of the letters 
which Sir Edward Grey and M. Paul Cambon 
exchanged on the far-seeing initiative of the 
Foreign Office in 1912, pointing out that no 
written or spoken agreement binds the two coun- 
tries, at the moment when the English minister 
asserts England's diplomatic independence, Eng- 
land discovers herself bound to France by all 
kinds of invisible but living bonds. Such is the 
unexpected result of her political method of laisser- 
faire — the opposite of Germany's — of her repug- 
nance to concerting and co-ordinating means sys- 
tematically to predetermined ends. After having 
allowed herself, little by little, and without making 
any preparations, to be forced into a war the risk 
of which had long been evident, England discovers, 
all at once, that without having signed anything, 
in spite of refusing to sign anything, by the silent 
pressure of circumstances she is inevitably driven 



PUBLIC OPINION 35 

into the formal alliance which her ministers had tried 
to avoid. " England had drifted into the war, and 
England had drifted into the alliance." To drift, 
that is to allow oneself to be led passively by the 
imperceptible and continuous current of events — 
or, in politics, to obey the over-cautious maxim 
which Mr. Asquith has given as his principle of 
government : " Wait and see." ^ At the critical 
moment, whilst the Secretary for Foreign Affairs 
is demonstrating that there is no diplomatic docu- 
ment setting up an alKance, the alliance is seen 
to be morally imperative as a result of the past. 
Of course, England is bound to nothing; the con- 
versations between the High Commands of the 
two countries were only conversations with a 
view to an agreement which remained a mere 
possibility, but they have introduced the British 
into the secret of our defences, and this inti- 
macy cannot have failed to rouse in France a 
hope of British support in case of German 
aggression. More imperative still, and pointed 
out as being so at the very beginning of the 
crisis by the great Conservative newspapers, is the 
arrangement by which our Navy left the Channel 
and Atlantic coasts of France to the protection 
of the British Navy in order to concentrate in the 
Mediterranean, where it assumes the protection 
of British interests. And such weight has this 
last fact that on the 2nd of August, before the 
Belgian question has been raised, Sir Edward Grey 

^ On this policy and its consequences consult the important 
book of Mr. F. S. Oliver, Ordeal by Battle. Cf . Austin Harrison, 
EnglaTid and Germany, 1907, and The Kaiser's War. 



36 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

gives to M. Cambon the assurance that, to the 
extent of her power, England will guarantee these 
coasts against every attack, though this does not 
prevent him from adding — such is his anxiety, even 
at such a moment, to avoid any appearance of war- 
like action — that this assurance must not be un- 
derstood to involve English intervention. But, of 
all the reasons which impel England at the critical 
moment to take her place by the side of France, 
the most active is that which is at the same time the 
most difficult to define and the most honourable : 
it is the idea of the entente, the recollection of so 
many words and tokens of friendship which seem 
to have given birth to a tacit promise; it is the 
feeling that an intimate union of ten years' stand- 
ing is as strong as a written contract to bind 
two nations to each other in so serious a crisis, 
and that when the one is in danger, the other 
cannot remain unconcerned without disgrace. On 
August 2, when Germany was openly marching 
on France, every Englishman in whom the inter- 
national religion of humanity, strengthened by 
pacifist puritanism, has not destroyed the sense 
of national honour, feels small at the thought 
that England is not already at the side of France. 
His impression is that of a duty shirked, of an act 
of disloyalty, almost of treachery, which the 
interested person is attempting to excuse, basing 
himself on the letter of the law. A few days after, 
heartfelt letters from English friends told me, 
what every one repeated later when I crossed the 
Channel : " We should not have been able to look 
a Frenchman in the face if we had not taken up 



PUBLIC OPINION 37 

arms ; you would really have had the right to call 
us perfidious Albion ! " A noble poem has said 
what was the feeling of relief when, on August 4, 
England took the step which bound her to us. 

" Most human France ! . . . 

. , . let this 
Be of that day remembered with what pride 
Our ancient island thrilled to the oceans wide, 
And our hearts leapt to know that England then. 
Equal in faith of free and loyal men, 
Stepped to her side ! " ^ 

Every one knows what decided everything, and, 
in a single day, secured the unanimity of the 
nation. Had the British Government reckoned 
on the violation of Belgian neutrality? At all 
events it had warned Germany of the immediate 
and necessary consequences of this step. No 
doubt, rather than any profound calculations of 
political psychology, Sir Edward Grey obeyed the 
command of the plighted word. But, even had 
he foreseen all that was to follow, we may believe 
that he would have acted precisely as he did. 
From the military point of view, perhaps it is 
to be regretted that General French's army did 
not arrive on the field forty-eight hours earlier; 
and yet, now that we know the enormous dis- 
proportion of the confronted forces, it is not 
certain that the issue would have been very dif- 
ferent. But what a moral advantage was ob- 
tained by a delay which, through the act of 
Germany, was only of a few days ! It proves 
to all neutrals and to history the innocence and 

1 France^ by Laurence Binyon, in The Times of July 14, 1915. 



38 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

the patience of a nation which waited to make up 
her mind to war till Germany, tearing up a common 
pact, forced her by the very terms of that pact 
to draw the sword. And better still, the event 
which ends the delay also ends at a single blow 
all possible internal opposition to the war — to 
the war which England would never have entered 
on out of self-interest (Mr. Oliver points out that 
the old-fashioned phrase, " British interests," 
had for many years been banished from the lan- 
guage of politics as not sufficiently idealistic) — 
but to the war which, if made now, before a greater 
and stronger Germany attacks an isolated England, 
can alone secure the future : Delenda est Carthago 
was Treitschke's constant cry; and everything 
points to this as the ultimate purpose of Germany. 
In the very number which gave the news, the 
papers which for years, and even the very day 
before, had been most hostile to the idea of war, 
those very newspapers which seemed to have 
made German interests and arguments their own, 
the Daily News at their head, proclaim the end of 
all polemics and an imperative national duty. 
England has pledged her word; the promise has 
come due : argument is over. From this moment, 
in all earnestness, the strict religious conscience, 
which fought so stoutly against the impulses and 
demands of mere patriotism, leads in the same 
direction. For two reasons the Germans counted 
on the inaction of a country which they had long 
looked upon as their future prey. By their 
methodical propaganda in industrial and noncon- 
formist circles, they thought they had won over 



PUBLIC OPINION 39 

the puritan conscience to their schemes; and, in 
the next place, it had never entered into their 
heads that a people who had refused to arm them- 
selves for war, might nevertheless determine to 
undertake it for the sake of a duty. Passively 
this people was to witness the invasion of Flanders, 
the defeat of France and Russia, the enslavement 
of the little neutral states; after which, when 
its own turn came, it would be too late to resist. 
Now, by an irony of fate and to the amazement 
of the Germans, it was precisely the English con- 
science which threw England, as yet ignorant of 
the hatred and greed with which she had been 
watched, into the struggle which it was her only 
fault not to have prepared for; it was this con- 
science which, speaking to millions of young men, 
was about to call up an army of volunteers on the 
continental scale, to weld the whole country into 
an ever-increasing will — ^the will to resist and to 
conquer — ^to improvise the impossible, and, correct- 
ing the accumulated errors of the past ever and 
again, to multiply tenfold for the Allies the value 
of England's help. And thus it was this conscience 
which was to save England. 



II 

England was innocent of the war, and she went 
to war like an innocent. She had never fought 
Germany ; she had no idea of the German methods 
of warfare. For her, war was a noble, dangerous 
and exciting game, in which that nation was bound 



40 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

to win which had the best men, not the most 
intellectual, the most educated, nor even, per- 
haps, the best armed ; but the finest, the healthiest, 
the hardiest, the most capable, beneath all their 
humour and good humour, of steadfast will, faith- 
fulness to duty, and stubbornness in effort. Such 
men as these — KipKng's men — English education, 
together with all the suggestions of English environ- 
ment, had never ceased to produce, in all the cate- 
gories of society ; the English looked upon them as 
the special human product of England; they con- 
stituted her peculiar virtue which had never failed 
her in her hour of need. In these men still lived, 
more or less clearly, the ancient idea of chivalry 
— of Christian and Western origin — which the 
national literature of the nineteenth century had 
revived, which Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Tenny- 
son taught or sang, whilst adapting it to the 
requirements of a modern and industrial age — ^the 
lofty French and English idea which the Germans 
have ridiculed. Was it not Mommsen who threw 
this sarcasm at the Kelts that they were " a people 
whose conception of a superior type had not gone 
beyond the knight " ? The knight, in modern 
England, is called by a name of great moral mean- 
ing and prestige — the gentleman; and he has re- 
mained essentially Christian. In his modern form 
he is the recognised model, the ideal type of 
which the nation, as a nation, wishes to practise 
the virtues — strength combined with gentleness, 
modesty in word and deed, silent subjection of 
selfish and conquering instinct to the desire for 
justice and truth. By the side of France, where 



PUBLIC OPINION 41 

a similar ideal is still alive — an ideal which springs 
from the same source, but which lacks the nuances 
of protestantism and is tinged with rationalism — 
in presence of an aggressive Germany which is not 
yet known to have given herself up to the worship 
of force and instinct, to the diabolical Nietzschean 
creed and to the memories of Teutonic paganism, 
England rises as the Christian and gentleman 
nation, conceiving war but in the manner of 
gentlemen and Christians. ^ She is also a nation 
of sportsmen, in the almost ethical sense which 
this word has assumed during the last fifteen 
or twenty years, a morality of new and special 
character having sprung from the practice of 
sports, that daily and almost excessive activity 
of the whole people. A nation of sportsmen 
anxious to play the game — ^that is, to play it 
scrupulously, without excitement or hatred, with- 
out ever allowing the desire to win to overcome 
respect for the rules ; ^ respecting also their oppo- 
nent, whom they believe to be worthy of them, 
and whose hand, whether they win or lose, they 

^ In the course of this war, in all the churches, prayers are 
offered for the enemy. This is the prayer of the Established 
Church ; I heard it in May 1915 in London and in a little country 
church. (The verses are separated by the response of the 
congregation, " Hear us, we beseech thee.") " That it may please 
thee to forgive our enemies, and to help us to forgive them ; to 
remove their misunderstanding, and to allay their bitterness ; 
to give them repentance for their misdoings, and a readiness to 
make amends ; to shew thy pity upon those of them who suffer — 
in battle, or through bereavement, poverty, or other miseries of 
war ; to reward with thy mercy such of them as shew mercy to 
their enemies ; be not overcome of evil : but overcome evil with 
good. When a man's ways please the Lord : He maketh even 
his enemies to be at peace with him.'^ 



42 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

wish, after the straggle, to grasp honourably. In 
spite of the fever of the Boer War — and one 
remembers how the English themselves laughed, 
later on, at their Maffickin' night — ^it was this con- 
ception of war and peace which allowed a statue 
of President Kruger to be set up at Pretoria two 
years after the submission of the Boers. And 
the same idea showed itself when a new English 
Dreadnought received the name of Botha, whilst 
the rebellion was miscarrying which the Germans 
had fomented, and on the success of which they 
counted, as if the Transvaal had been a Prussian 
Poland or an Alsace-Lorraine. 

Such were the illusions and feelings with which 
England entered upon the struggle. An English 
volunteer said to me, " We expected a rather rough 
game of football " — a curious word for us, but 
quite natural on the other side of the Channel, 
where men are inclined to take life as a game — - 
a game sometimes dangerous and difficult, and 
all the more exciting — because all expressions 
of anxiety and emotion, indeed, anxiety and 
emotion themselves, are forbidden by English 
ethics and etiquette; and in the face of hard 
reverses, or obvious peril, good form exacts the 
most commonplace v/ords, with the impassive and 
smiling attitude of superiority to fate — and we 
all know what power have words and gestures to 
create a spiritual state. To-day England no longer 
believes that a war with Germany is a game of 
football; she has at last learnt the full meaning 
of the word enemy, and that this enemy is not a 
mere opponent, but that he hates, and earnestly 



PUBLIC OPINION 43 

wishes to destroy, without being particular as to 
the means. She is astonished at her former sim- 
pHcity, which was, hke so many other deficien- 
cies, a failure in adaptation, proving once more 
how slow this old country is in changing her habits 
and tendencies of life and thought to respond 
to the changes of the outer world. Against the 
nation which pubhcly tore up a treaty, and then, 
in cold blood, burned and slaughtered in order 
to paralyse innocent Belgium by terror, and get 
through quicker, they began by fighting with 
the manners of the battle of Fontenoy. They 
long avoided certain proceedings which would 
probably have been decisive if used at once : 
for instance, from sheer conscience and humani- 
tarian generosity, they delayed for several months 
declaring contraband of war foreign imports which 
were indispensable to Germany, allowing her 
to accumulate fresh stocks of wheat and cotton, 
which threaten to prolong the war indefinitely. 
Thousands of Germans, settled in the United 
Kingdom, were allowed to live and go about in 
peace, mthout even being watched — some of whom 
were notoriously related to leaders of the enemy. 
The commander of the Emden, whose acts of 
piracy were undeniable, had his sword returned 
to him with compliments. The officers of the 
Blucher, who died in captivity at Edinburgh, were 
given a funeral with almost national honours, 
the whole garrison turning out under arms. At 
Oxford they went further : in the hall of New 
College, memorial tablets were set up in honour of 
former German scholars of the Cecil Rhodes Foun- 



44 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

dation who died fighting England, and whose names 
will endure in the old University beside those of 
England's heroes; the numbers of their Prussian 
or Bavarian regiments were not forgotten. For 
the captive enemy officers a country house was 
provided, the fitting up of which called for a 
special vote of £20,000 : Donnington Hall, where 
these gentlemen, dressed afresh in flannels, tweeds, 
or cheviots, led the " genteel " and leisurely 
English country life : tennis, flirtations with charm- 
ing visitors, tea served on velvet lawns, though 
only one servant was allowed to every three 
officers. In short, England seemed to remember 
the romantic and legendary times of chivalry, 
the luxurious captivity of our King Jean le Bon. 
and the tournaments to which he was treated at 
Windsor by his victor — a victor, by the way, 
who exacted a ransom which came near ruining 
France. The Germans enjoyed it all and sneered; 
the Allies sometimes wondered. A good many 
English people began to wonder too, questions 
were asked in Parliament. 

Meanwhile, astounding news was arriving, first 
from Belgium, then from France : sacking of towns, 
rape, systematic slaughter. The papers gave start- 
ling details. But to a public brought up in the 
worship of common sense and law, to readers 
accustomed to order, moderation, and all the 
ancestral wisdom of England, to moral, orderly 
Englishmen, who believe only in what they have 
seen, the monstrous — which they have never seen 
— was difficult to reconcile with their notions of 
the real. In this old and deeply civilised country, 



PUBLIC OPINION 45 

such an inversion of civilisation was not to be 
conceived. Far from the heavy clay soil and solid 
realities of England, under the influences of the 
Continent and the tumults of war, the newspaper 
correspondents were surely exaggerating. After 
all, the Germans were known, there were only too 
many of them in England. That these quiet 
drinkers of lager-bier, these stolid clerks and trades- 
men devoid of humour, and only too attentive to 
their book-keeping, should between Monday and 
Tuesday, within one hundred and fifty miles of 
London, behave like Kipling's Dacoits, seemed 
unbelievable : probably, no doubt, some yarn from 
the front, spun round some fortuitous incident in 
those picturesque "foreign parts," where imagin- 
ation is so quickly stirred. Those doubts were 
not expressed, but they weighed heavily and did 
not help to rouse the mind of the nation. It was 
not until the first letters from English ofiicers 
were published in the papers, undeniable docu- 
ments, emanating from genuine " gentlemen," 
not the sport of their impressions, and who 
" knew what evidence was," — it was not until the 
stories of the first wounded returning to England 
were heard, and then, after this preparation, the 
complete reports of the Belgian Commission of 
Enquiry were published, one by one, that the 
incredible truth began to be accepted by every 
one; and even then it was impossible that the 
effect should be instantaneous, the mind of the 
masses in England being of such a nature that it 
can only be excited to belief and emotion by 
immediate and concrete sensations. To the work- 



46 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

ing people in the Midlands and the West, Belgium 
and France are very distant countries, and the war 
hardly differed in their eyes from all those which 
England has always carried on so successfully 
against so many foreign nations. Little by little, 
however, under the pressure of a reality soon 
too evident and too near at hand, a vivid realisa- 
tion of German crime sank into the depths of 
the country. It raised a horror which may be 
regarded to-day as the principal and invincible 
element of the English will to conquer. It was, 
in fact, an abstract duty which had brought this 
will into being. Abomination for the deeds of 
Germany quickly rallied all the profound and 
spontaneous energies of the national soul. At 
the moment when Germany, maddened by her 
pantheistic worship of Force and Will, drunk with 
blood and victory, appeared to herself as God, 
in England, where everything is judged from the 
ethical point of view, Germany appeared as the 
Devil.i 

In the upper sections of the great public, this 
latter idea had arisen more quickly. The reason 
was that, in order to stimulate enlistment, it 
had been necessary to demonstrate that it was 
a duty, and so to prove the responsibility of the 
enemy. Translations, at popular prices, of Bern- 
hardi, Treitschke, Nietzsche, Von der Goltz, of 
the manual of the German staff on the usages of 

^ " We are up in a very real sense against the devil incarnate.*' 
— Letter to The Times, June 1915, of Dr. Furse, Bishop of 
Pretoria. 



PUBLIC OPINION 47 

war, began, from the month of September, to 
appear in great numbers. In the fifteen editions 
printed in this same month of the posthumous 
and prophetic book of Professor Cramb, in the 
penny and twopenny pamphlets pubhshed by 
the University of Oxford, every one was able to 
study the main outlines of the mystical and cynical 
philosophy of Might and War, the Prussian theory 
of the Absolute State, the anti-Christian religion 
and ethics of the Superman. In a country where 
many men scarcely dare to pronounce the word 
" hell " above a whisper, Nietzsche's blasphemous 
inversion of divine words seemed to call for fire 
from heaven. With regard to the others, the 
academic bores with their tirades about hate and 
conquest, amazement was mingled with a feeling 
of ridicule. To England, scornful of systems and 
of pure ideas, and who nevertheless has pro- 
duced philosophers (the least systematic of all, the 
apostles of empiricism and induction), but in a 
spontaneous way, and without taking the trouble 
to teach philosophy in her schools, to this open- 
air people of action and common sense, whose 
colleges and universities aim chiefly at producing 
gentlemen and sportsmen, to these men, so un- 
pedantic that they refuse to regard learning, and 
one might almost say, thought, as belonging to 
the highest range of values, it seemed incon- 
gruous and almost amusing, that this awful war 
should have been first conceived in historical 
and philological academies and that somniferous 
lucubrations on the special virtues and mission 
of the Teutonic race, the greatness of the Holy 



48 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

Roman Empire, and the World conceived as Will, 
could ever have been taken in such fierce earnest- 
ness. Certainly the lack of humour verged on the 
ludicrous; and in spite of all the pretensions of 
Germany to the higher civilisation, one detected 
in her will to reign by *' frightfulness," something 
laborious and provincial which at times made you 
laugh, and at times, as Kipling wrote to a French 
friend, " seemed to crown the horror." One won- 
dered to discover that so much pride and rage 
could have accumulated in the souls of spectacled 
doctors, and one called to mind the definition once 
given by Lord Palmerston of the country which 
with its terrible explosion was now astounding the 
civilised world : "a land of damned professors " 
— damned indeed ! 

In the same way the pride of the German people 
appeared infernal, and frequently, too, ill-bred and 
grotesque. The whole German attitude shocked 
fundamentally not only the English conscience, 
but, what is perhaps worse, the English sense of 
propriety, not less ancient and profound. The 
impression was the same as if a man, who hitherto 
had been taken for a gentleman, were all at once 
to begin to gesticulate and rave about his great- 
ness and his hatred. For an EngHshman, who is 
bound all his life by a convention hostile to 
all natural expression, and who masters in himself, 
and never supposes in others, violent emotions 
and instinctive impulses, hatred, and still more 
the manifestation of it, are not only condemned 
by Christian morals, but are the mark of a rebel 
against good form, which consists in self-control, 



PUBLIC OPINION 49 

in destroying, or at least repressing in oneself, 
anything opposed to ordinary and orderly appear- 
ances. Talk of hatred thus distinguishes the 
non-gentleman from the gentleman, and usually 
reveals a primitive nature : after all, did not the 
Germans themselves speak of their hatred as 
" elemental." In the opinion of a mature society 
which only knows its own free, comfortable and 
polished life, a life in which emotion now seems 
to be as much vetoed as duelling, the state of mind 
revealed by hymns of hatred, by the impreca- 
tion Gott strafe England, seemed strangely naive. 
A caricature in Punch, now famous, showed a 
worthy German family assembled around the 
coffee-pot for its morning exercises in hatred : 
the Herr Papa, boorish, with bristling hair and 
heavy moustache, the voluminous mamma clad 
in a dressing-gown, and, receiving their teaching 
with docility, the Backfische daughters, the small 
schoolboy, all, down to the Dachshund, practising, 
in conscientious attitudes, frowns and rolling eyes 
— the Augenrollen, which is the sign of threaten- 
ing fury, and which civilians, in a country where 
the military rules, have learnt from the officers. 

But, in the Teutonic manifestations of hatred, 
something much worse than a want of education 
was to be noticed : a profound lack of balance, a 
nervous excitement, a tendency to hysteria which 
the Englishman despises above everything, and 
which according to him is incompatible with the 
dignity — he does not say any longer of a gentleman, 
but simply of a man. As Kipling wrote again, " it 
is not thus that a great people expresses itself," 



50 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

and it was taken as a sign of " a she nation." 
Everything seemed to show that Germany was 
incapable of that resistance to impulse, of that will 
which masters reflex action; in a word, of that 
self-control which is the main element of manliness. 
It was remembered that, replying to Sir Edward 
Goschen, when the latter informed him that Eng- 
land would never tolerate the violation of Belgian 
neutrality, the German Chancellor had launched 
into a " harangue " (the word is unusual in 
England) of twenty minutes, and that he had 
seemed " very excited," " very agitated," to such 
a degree that the British ambassador had thought 
it wise to give up the discussion. The same 
symptoms of fever and mental disturbance ap- 
peared in the newspaper articles, in the mani- 
festoes issued by the " intellectuals," extolling 
the virtues and superiority of Germany : they 
exaggerated, and according to English ethics 
exaggeration is a sign of moral weakness. No 
less significant was the national craze for Zeppelins 
and giant howitzers. But more than anything 
else, war conceived and carried on in the German 
fashion, as a carnival in which the human animal 
loses all restraint, orgies of blood after frenzies 
of hate, pointed to insanity. The culture of the 
nation, which was aiming at teaching its Kultur 
to England and France, was revealed as power- 
less to repress in itself those base instincts which 
bring man down to the level of the gorilla. With 
a conviction and a contempt much deeper, because 
silent and unexpressed, the Englishman saw the 
German as the German had seen him, and pro- 



PUBLIC OPINION 51 

nounced him destitute of real culture, incapable of 
efficient will and discipline. Thus the principles 
of two civilisations, that of military autocracy and 
that of puritanism, confronted one another with 
similar condemnation. German culture, scientific 
and utilitarian, providing a community with the 
means of dominating the foreigner; English cul- 
ture, by which the individual learns to domin- 
ate himself. German will, that of a society which 
is directed by the State as an army by its 
general; and English will, that of the man 
who is master of himself and responsible but to 
himself alone, who decides for himself and is 
restrained by his conscience only, a conscience 
which has been developed by three hundred and 
fifty years of biblical rigour. German discipline, 
lastly, imposed from without by the superior on 
the inferior, and maintained by the prestige of 
the sword and memories of the rod; English 
discipline, which springs from within, that of the 
inner self, which, recognising a law, because 
it has the instinct of and the craving for order, 
freely submits to it and defends it. To these 
contrasts, more or less clearly perceived, were 
added the invincible differences of methods and 
spontaneous mental tendencies. The Englishman, 
accustomed to judge everything by his sensa- 
tions and experience, was astonished at the ob- 
stinacy of the German in regarding him, on the 
word of the philologists, as a " cousin " — a hateful 
cousin, it is true, because a traitor to his family. 
In every respect he felt himself to be the reverse 
of the Teuton. 



52 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

Verbal expressions of hatred were followed by- 
deliberate outrages — acts no less extraordinary 
than the words, and in which hatred was combined 
with cowardice. Zeppelins aiming their bombs at 
sleeping and defenceless country towns, attacks 
by cruisers which suddenly appeared in the morn- 
ing before watering-places and scuttled off after 
a slaughter of children. Then the submarines : 
merchant ships and fishing-boats sunk without 
warning, German sailors laughing at the drowning 
agonies of a crew, and, crowning all, the horror of 
the Lusitania, wholesale and premeditated murder, 
a criminal attack on those whom the chivalrous 
nations of the West regard as sacred — women, 
young girls and children. Add to this systematic 
insult : the determination to strike at the pride 
and self-respect of England by practising cruelty 
on defenceless men, by subjecting British prisoners 
to special treatment, by starving and bullying 
them, by choosing them for the most objection- 
able work; by shutting up captive officers in 
cattle-trucks for whole days at a time, and if 
one of them tried to come out, by kicking him 
back again, in order to reduce them to filth 
and degradation, bring them down to the level of 
animals, under the eyes of their men, and amidst 
the coarse jokes of the crowd which came to see 
these English gentlemen imprisoned in the train, 
and rejoiced thus to revenge the vague uneasi- 
ness it had formerly felt in the presence of their 
superior civilisation and dignity. Such crimes 
and insults stung the country in its most sensi- 
tive and intimate fibre, and roused at last in 



PUBLIC OPINION 53 

the deeper masses the fighting temper, a passion 
ever growing in intensity, unexpressed, it is true, 
but all the more terrible on that account. There 
was now no need to talk of the danger of England 
in order to stimulate her men to ask for rifles. 
Thus once more, by his blindness to psycho- 
logical values, the dull and malevolent German 
had committed an egregious blunder. The slow- 
ness of the English mind to be stirred and to 
change its habits, the impotence of the English 
Government to carry on a war if it is not backed 
by the whole opinion of the nation, the inade- 
quacies of a volunteer army which, moreover, had 
to be improvised, these had been invaluable trumps 
in Germany's hand. Without any military profit, 
for the mere pleasure of the low insult which 
calls forth but contempt in return, Germany be- 
haved exactly in the way which, more rapidly than 
any other, was to stir up the spirit of England, 
weld all parties in the same determination to 
fight to the finish, and increase the rate at which 
the new armies were being recruited. Some of 
these actions were actually longed for by thinking 
Englishmen. At a moment when recruiting seemed 
to be slowing down, a friend across the water wrote 
to me : "If only we could have a little German 
raid on the East coast ! " A week after, enemy 
cruisers were bombarding Scarborough and Hartle- 
pool, and the rate of enlistment began to rise at 
once. Since then worse horrors have been seen — 
murder of English wounded, asphyxiating gas, 
the slow and torturing effects of which have 
been more fully described by the English papers 



54 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

than by ours, liquid flame, poisoned wells in South 
Africa : all these were so many reasons for going 
to the front; and some posters which in every 
town are calling on young men to do their duty, 
merely repeat without a single word of commen- 
tary these crimes and outrages. Last May, in 
the suburbs of London, a friend told me how 
he had lost his gardener. He came one fine 
morning, twisting his cap about in his hands. 
" Well, sir," he said, "I've been reading about 
this gas business, and somehow I can't stand 
it any longer : I feel I have got to enlist ! " 
And in Oxfordshire a landlord told me, this time 
with regard to the Lusitania, a similar farewell 
speech from a young farmer. Moral indigna- 
tion, a revolt of the conscience, the strong feeling 
which prevents a man from passively watching 
a cowardly act of cruelty, these are the causes and 
the reasons which finally concentrated on the 
war all the deepest spiritual forces of the nation. 
Of course, there is a minority which is able to 
appreciate the danger without seeing the enemy 
landing : it is to ensure the present and future 
safety of their country that these are resolved 
to-day on a fight to a finish. But for the great 
masses of the people, who cannot bring themselves 
to conceive a German army on English soil, there 
is no question of the safety of the country, or 
even of the struggle for a democratic ideal of jus- 
tice and liberty against a principle of aggressive 
autocracy. With them it is a question of much 
older and more general things : of the fight against 
evil, against the powers of sin and crime, against 



PUBLIC OPINION 55 

Satan, the enemy of God ^ and man, the old dragon 
whom the knights of former days went out to 
fight, whom all the efforts of religion and civilisa- 
tion, of Christian and civilised England have been 
directed throughout the centuries to defeating 
and driving back, foot by foot, to the abyss. 
This idea, which the German orgy of pride and 
hatred has done so much to create, is accompanied 
by a feeling quite different from hatred : execra- 
tion — an idea and a feeling which are religious, 
and therefore of infinite power. Such ideas never 
die, except with the death of the man who forms 
them, or with the destruction of their object. 
That is why, whether he says it or not, every 
Englishman to-day is quite sure that the present 
struggle is a fight to a finish. In vain does Ger- 
many, having missed her mark, try periodically to 
raise a talk of peace : the moral forces which she 
has brought into being will not be laid. Moreover, 
it is known from experience that the enemy does 
not consider himself bound by a treaty (and in 
the history of the war no fact has more " shocked " 
the English conscience than this), consequently 
it is impossible to treat with him or to live with 
him; and therefore there is nothing for it but 
to break his power for ever, or to die in the 
attempt. Add to this that in England such an 
idea, once formed and diffused, tends to endure 
indefinitely. It has always taken much time to 
overcome the inertia of a nation in whom the force 
of habit is so great, and make it change its move- 

^ God's other foe is the way in which Germany was spoken of 
in a poem recently published in the Daily Chronicle. 



56 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

ment and its direction. But, in a mass, the slower 
the movement is at the start, the longer will 
this quality of inertia make it last. Against 
Germany, of whom but yesterday it knew nothing, 
this nation is now only beginning to move as a 
whole. The war will come to an end one day, but 
England will never forget. 

September 1915, 



THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 



In London, last May, the main outlines of the 
special psychology which we have described could 
be easily perceived, and also the enormous size of 
the mass which was to be set in motion — a mass 
which can absorb such an infinite force before 
any change in direction can be noticed. Even 
a foreigner could not resist the general illusion. 
At the sight of this mass, a strong mental effort 
was necessary to keep in mind the idea of imminent 
danger : a danger which is certain for this country 
until it has changed, into visible and systematic- 
ally directed forces of attack, the whole of its 
inner and latent energy. One fell a prey to the 
silent and tranquillising suggestion of things. The 
enormous magnitude of the town, of its traffic, 
accumulated wealth, and population, the cease- 
less tides of life, youth and hurrying crowds, the 
new honeycombs of this immense hive of brick 
which, this year as in the years before, keeps 
spreading over the surrounding country : all this 
was enhanced by the contrast with the pathetic 
emptiness and solemn silence of Paris, a Paris 
which has been pumped dry of its vital substance 

67 



58 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

by mobilisation. I remember the Thames below 
London Bridge, the wharves, the docks, the clusters 
of great steamers, still panting after a long run. I 
remember the Bank, the black ant-hill of the City, 
the great main arteries, the Strand, Piccadilly, 
Holborn, Oxford Street, the motley and closely 
packed rows of large motor-buses, the never-ending 
traffic, so rapid yet so orderly, which a vast and 
imperturbable policeman, glove in hand, regulates 
with a scarcely perceptible turn of his hand. And 
then, again, an endless suburb, through which we 
rushed on a clear June evening, as far as the last 
rows of houses, pushed out suddenly into a land- 
scape, which but five years ago was pure country. 
The effect was that of a spontaneous growth, of a 
tentacle which has stretched outwards silent and 
imperceptible. For miles and miles the broad, 
dim, shining street, the shops with windows to the 
top, crammed in the English way from floor to 
ceiling with groceries, meat, fruit and clothing — 
the fishmongers' shops where great silvery salmon 
gleam beneath the gas-jets, between transparent 
blocks of ice : a wealth of goods still flowing in, 
in spite of submarines, from every corner of the 
world. And no less full the flow of human life : 
children, girls chiefly, young men too, of whom 
many in khaki, fresh faces that the damp coolness 
of the air sets aglow. And still the shops flew past, 
rows upon rows of buildings, as if turned out by 
machinery, as if set up by twenties or fifties at a 
time, and the churches, and then all at once the 
green, unbounded vista of a park. There was no 
difference between the successive parishes : it was 



THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 59 

all the same continuous growth, the same inex- 
haustible proliferation, which repeats cells of the 
same type unchangingly, as in the hive of a given 
type of bee, of which each generation, each indi- 
vidual, carries in itself, unknowingly, the principle, 
the law and invisible germ. A world apart, spring- 
ing from itself and knowing nothing but itself, a 
world that manifests a power of order and organ- 
isation no less active than that of Germany, and 
yet how different ! much older, and much slower in 
its processes ; for it is inspired far less by rational 
thought and conscious will than by natural in- 
stinct, and it proceeds more in the manner of an 
elementary and unconscious form of life, whose 
ancient branches are ever and again covered with 
fresh buds. 

And then again, established and respected wealth, 
the cold, stately vistas of mansions in the West 
End, fading into the grey distance in a dim veil of 
mist, the rows of great clubs, fortresses of silence 
and security, from which all anxiety, all care, seem 
shut out, together with the roar of the street, 
by the thick plate glass, where the attendance is 
automatically perfect, where all is luxury, calm 
and massive as the monumental leather arm-chairs 
in which each one sits apart, turning the crackling, 
glazed sixteen-page newspapers. And close by, 
behind noble arches, the parks, the joy and the 
wonder of the flowers, the culminating triumph 
of the learned and traditional labour of a host 
of gardeners : masses of rhododendrons in a 
murmuring cloud of bees; irises on the banks of 
some free Serpentine where girls are being rowed 



60 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

along ; gorgeous and delicate azaleas, lawns whose 
shaven green turf reveals centuries of care ; wild 
dells where primrose, hawthorn, foxglove and wild 
rose mark, as in the open country, the progress of 
the season ; long avenues of ancient oaks reminding 
one of the great estates and the feudal landscapes 
of England — and yonder, completing the illusion 
of country within town, the flash of some rider, 
some childish figure, locks streaming in the wind, 
carried along by her hunter. 

No. Close as was the danger, great as was the 
part already taken by the country in the common 
effort of the Allies, the appearance of England was 
not altered by it. Thus, when a great and luxuri- 
ous Titanic is in danger, and the officers are already 
trying to ward off the peril, the passengers fail to 
realise the threatening catastrophe, the bands go on 
playing in the saloons, not a single electric light has 
yet gone out, the waiters are still busy serving tea, 
and everywhere the usual impression of order, dis- 
cipline and quiet power is to be felt. Still more 
than the sight of material greatness does this feeling 
make for confidence. For visible things are but a 
result : the essential matter is the moral and social 
principle which is at their root, and lives uncon- 
sciously in each soul. Sustained energy, steadfast 
effort, devotion to duty, loyalty to the memory and 
customs of the national past, to the still living in- 
stitutions which stand for that past, proud respect 
for accepted moral authority, for the law, for the 
king and for oneself, these indeed seem to form 
a collective spiritual power assured of its own 
strength and of its infinite future. 



THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 61 



II 

This impression of fixed and secure order I felt 
in a less definable, yet still deeper degree in the 
country, that country-side which is so purely 
English, just as that of Brittany is only Breton, 
and that of Japan nothing but Japanese, by reason 
of the millennial marriage between the land and 
the people, which has resulted in each sharing in 
the inmost nature of the other. A solemn, pas- 
toral country in which the trees, perhaps by reason 
of the neighbouring sea, are of a deeper green than 
elsewhere. Never have I known it so beautiful 
and so deeply charged with meaning as in the 
matchless light which prevailed during those weeks 
of May and June, and which lengthened out from 
day to day, as if never to pass away. There 
was all the freshness and luxuriance of a spring- 
time which is later than ours by a month : it was 
a surprise to find so late the hedges loaded with a 
thicker and colder snow of hawthorn blossom, the 
lilac just opening, and in the meadows such sheets of 
buttercups as we never see in France. By a mental 
effort only was it possible to remember the horrors 
of the war, the germ-infected mud of Flanders, 
the agonies under shrapnel and chlorine ; but when 
one glanced around, the splendid magic of Nature 
seemed to give the he to all this, a golden stillness 
thrilhng with the invisible raptures of the lark, or 
the two sweet, full notes of the cuckoo, coming 
who could tell from how far, telHng of thick and 
leafy shade, of the fulness of spring. Few human 



62 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

beings to be seen, families of horses grazing in the 
meadows, the foals beside their dams, cattle lying 
amidst the grass and flowers, under the patriarchal 
oaks whose shadows form blue islands in the shining 
sea of buttercups. The great, uneven circle of the 
horizon merging into blue on the distant azure of 
the sky. And then those never-ending evenings, 
the twilights of the north, the pale, even radiance 
in which everything becomes yet stiller, in which 
the flowers seem colder, calmer and more wonder- 
ful . Mornings of endless purity, a light as of Eden, 
the pastoral land becoming then a vision of legend, 
as though the youth of the world had returned 
to last for ever. Oh, the irony of this peace falling 
from the blue above as if to enfold our earth in 
benediction ! Browning's lines came unsought to 
one's lips — 

" Morning's at seven . . . 
The lark's on the wing, 
The snail's on the thorn, 
God's in His heaven, 
All's right with the world. . . .** 

AlVs right with the world: in addition to this 
universal deceptiveness of nature in this old shire 
of Oxford, the very heart of England, the pecu- 
liarly English illusion could be felt much more 
directly and deeply than in the town; the 
stability, the ancient order of the country — an 
order, so it seemed, as inviolable as the land which 
no invader's foot has trod since the Conquest. 
The old social organisation of this country here 
revealed itself to the eye. First, almost hidden 



THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 63 

behind its oaks and its great cedars, standing in 
the midst of an estate inscribed already, perhaps, 
by the Conqueror in his Domesday Book, is the 
manor house, the long, rectangular building of 
stone where the squire lives, whose fathers legally 
governed the parish which, through the authority 
of the dim yet deeply rooted feudal tradition, he 
still virtually governs. A little way off, amidst 
the green mounds of the churchyard, rises the low% 
square tower of the small Norman church, covered 
with ivy to its battlements ; and close beside it, 
in the midst of fair tennis lawns, stands the goodly 
flower-covered house of the rector^ — ^the spiritual 
and truly active head of this little world, as the 
squire is its lay patron — a " gentleman " hke him, 
since he is a priest and as such admitted to the 
same caste. A little way off, behind some hay- 
stacks, a slate-covered roof reveals another social 
category, that of the farmers, — farmers from father 
to son, descendants of the ancient yeomen, and 
who, in spite of their pianos and their daughters 
in white pique, remain quite distinct. Then, down 
yonder, the village, where the poor live, those 
labourers who hire themselves out and own 
nothing, and whose sires were the true aborigines 
and served the same glebe. Christmas card cot- 
tages, roofs of thatch and moss, with curling 
blue smoke, which sink low over the tapestry 
of climbing roses, over the tiny diamond panes 
of the ancient windows of long ago ; small gardens 
blazing with the splendour of the season : irises, 
tulips, poppies, peonies, hollyhocks; and in front 
of them the common, the village green, which 



64 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

Shakespeare might have seen, under whose an- 
cestral trees a comedy of Shakespeare would be 
in keeping, and where little girls in light cotton 
frocks are dancing as in ages past their grand- 
dames danced : a swarm of pink and blue butter- 
flies in the green shade. 

You must come on a Sunday, as the English love 
to do, to seek peace and moral assurance in the 
atmosphere of this old world. It is in its essence 
Christian : the spirit can be felt floating over the 
fields, emanating on that day, from the pealing 
of the bell, so slow and so monotonous, from the 
humble Norman nave in which the small com- 
munity is gathering — each in his station, respect- 
ing an immemorial order, each yielding to the 
influence, vague but solemn, of the unchanging 
rite. Drop by drop, spaced out by the sleepy 
silence of the fields, the bell lets its one note 
fall, ever the same, and under the peaceful in- 
fluence the inmost soul of this countryside rises, 
— an all-important element in the soul of England. 
For if the numbers, the visible energies, the great 
developments of England, are no longer found 
here to-day, if the old rural world is, from the 
economic and social point of view, but a sur- 
vival, a carefully cherished memory, the visions 
which it summons up still have power. All art 
and literature, from the pictures of the great 
landscape painters, from the novels of Meredith 
and George Eliot, down to Christmas cards and 
penny novelettes, contribute to their preserva- 
tion. Kipling has described the home-sickness of 



THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 65 

the Indian civil servant, and the way it springs 
from memories of the village, of the village church, 
and the fields sleeping in their Sabbath peace. In 
town one hves as one can : town is a factory for 
work and profit. But in the country, real England 
still lives, its ancient root persisting and active. 
Here is the home of tradition worshipped by 
Enghshmen; here is the only social hierarchy 
recognised by them, the higher caste of which 
has so long ruled the country and still holds its 
spell over every mind : when one has used the 
words county people, landed gentry, there is nothing 
more to be said. 

It is one of the curious features of this strange 
country, that the moral principle of civilisation 
and society is, to so great an extent, essentially 
aristocratic and rural, even though its activities are 
chiefly industrial and commercial, even though the 
immense majority of its people are crowded into 
huge brick cities under an everlasting pall of 
factory smoke — even though, politically, it is more 
and more tending towards social democracy. The 
contrast thus existing between this principle of 
order and culture and the conditions really prevail- 
ing to-day, is all the more striking to us because 
in our country the factors are reversed. France, 
in spite of the great development of her manu- 
factures, still remains a community where life and 
activities are in the main rural. And yet the forms 
of civihsation and of intellect, the conceptions of 
the ideal, have been, in France, for the last three 
centuries, of urban type and origin, the country 
being but a hoHday place and the home of peasants. 



66 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

For one must distinguish between the great masses 
of a people and those who are its spiritual leaders, 
because they have prestige. From the eighteenth 
century onwards, the town has been the magnet in 
France, and the manor house in England; this is 
made clear by the paintings of the period. Nearly 
all English portraits are of squires and their famihes : 
untroubled faces used to the open air, with the usual 
background of leafy park. The French portraits, 
on the contrary — witty features, sparkling eyes, 
waggish lips in a setting of panelhng and curtains 
— reveal the refinements, the pleasures and viva- 
city of drawing-room life. The same difference 
is apparent between the types of our higher bour- 
geoisie and that of the English gentry (who can 
show enthusiasm for golf); and the contrast of 
the two principles is still more striking if, for 
instance, our lycees be compared with the public 
schools of England : I mean those which lead, 
which the others try to imitate, and which aim 
much less at providing the boy with intellectual 
equipment and training than at shaping him with 
physical and moral discipline on the type of the 
gentleman. Such schools are nearly always in the 
country, surrounded by fields and lawns ; and 
the life the boys lead there, as later on at the old 
universities of Oxford and Cambridge, resembles, 
in its games, its setting and manners, that of the 
manor house. 

Thus persists in England the worship and the 
influence of a social caste only too certain that 
its order and its peace are assured. An influence 
more and more ideal, sentimental and undefined, as 



I 



THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 67 

industrial democracy extends and speaks more 
clearly, and for this reason all the stronger. It is 
like a family or clan religion, more sacred by 
the persistence of memory and by all that we 
feel of the difference between modern life and the 
olden times. English hearts are more sensitive 
than others to such spells, and the magic of this 
rural world springs from the past that seems to 
endure there alive for ever. It tells of the power 
and stability of tradition. Everything in it seems 
to say, hke the old Python of the Jungle : " What 
has been shall be " ; everything there seems to 
confirm the ancient saying, so truly English, 
which Mr. Lloyd George recently urged Parlia- 
ment to renounce : the good thing is the old thing. 
Such is the silent suggestion which comes from 
the manor house, from the rose-decked cottages, 
from the slow, periodic labours of the fields, 
from those spreading oaks whose protecting reign 
endures so long — and which no one would ever 
dream of felling; from those meadows and hedges 
that have never changed within living memory, 
from all those things which the hand of time 
has clothed with harmonious beauty. Over these 
gardens lies an enchantment, as if they had been 
asleep a thousand years, in a slumber which has 
long passed into the soul of this rural people; 
and this tranquillity seems to be the visible and 
ever-enduring peace of England. To-day these in- 
fluences act in the same way as, in the great cities, 
the mighty sense of life, of a teeming life, strong 
by its law, and which cannot but go on develop- 
ing for ever. In country, as well as in town, and 



68 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

more so even, something of the deep founda- 
tions of England can be perceived, and the impres- 
sion is that of immovable stability. Hence, since 
the beginning of the war, the incessant and, to a 
foreign eye, paradoxical effort of the most patriotic 
in the educated and governing classes, to alarm 
the country. The squire in the village meetings, 
the rector in his pulpit, the Cabinet ministers, the 
great authoritative voices of the nation address- 
ing the city crowds — a Rosebery, a Beresford, a 
Milner, a Balfour, a Curzon, a Carson — and 
regularly the magazine and newspaper writers, all 
alike work to this end. 

Thus in the little church of the truly Christian 
village where a special prayer is offered for the 
enemy, and where God is implored not to allow 
hatred and desire for vengeance to enter English 
hearts, I heard the clergyman explaining the 
national danger to the labourers and farmers, 
telling them how, if Germany succeeded in ruling 
from Hamburg to Dieppe and dominating Europe, 
her permission would be necessary not only for 
the continued existence of England in a political 
sense, but for the continued bringing of food to 
English tables. Hammering the pulpit with his 
fist, speaking with the genial energy of a leader 
talking to his men, and well conscious of his 
authority, he was pointing out their duty to the 
young men. Yes, conscription was near at hand, 
but it was not yet too late to go and fight as 
true men, as Englishmen — of their own free 
will. At the church door, in the porch — and he 



THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 69 

pointed to it— was a list of honour, written in 
his own hand, and giving the names of the 
attested men in the parish. Well, once conscrip- 
tion was passed, it would be too late to figure on 
that Hst ; those who wished to see their names on 
it had better make haste ! 

Hymns and prayers were resumed. Calm and 
solemnising influence of this half- patriarchal ser- 
vice ! What naked, direct, touching authority 
have these bibUcal words, the majesty of which 
is still further enhanced by the archaic EngUsh 
of the sixteenth century! Under the stirring 
influence of the music, and the ritual solemnity of 
the service, one seemed to feel the secret life of 
England's ancient heart — its calm and regular beat. 
Looking along the wall of an aisle, I saw row after 
row of inscriptions : the names of the squires in 
their order of succession since 1750; at their side 
in a column were those of the rectors. Now, as 
the service drew to a close, the priest alone 
before the altar at the further end of the choir, 
standing straight with his scarlet stole, was 
facing the congregation and uttering the com- 
mandments of the Law. Most impressive the 
sheer severity of this ancient version from the 
Hebrew, in which the archaic Thou shalt not, 
seems, after each thrilling interval of silence, to 
emphasize the power of the imperious prohibition. 
At the close, a ceremony special to war-time : 
the people standing, farmers and labourers, for 
the National Anthem, led by the choir; a choir 
in three rows — ^three generations : the youngest in 
front, the urchins of the parish, with very serious 



70 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

faces, in their white surpHces similar to those of 
their elders — ^the tiny boys of eight and ten, 
gravely taking in, as their fathers and their 
ancestors did at their age, the essential rhythms 
of English life. 

This old rural world of England has done much 
to maintain, by its spirit and prestige, the habitual 
delays and sleepiness of this country. But once 
let the idea of national danger penetrate, and this 
same prestige will rouse religiously the determina- 
tion to resist and conquer, for this rustic world 
shows England in her ancient and almost legendary 
form, a form that inspires sentiment, and in- 
stilled with all the powers of feeling and poetry. 
Indeed, this is to-day the main reason of its 
survival. Economically these fields and woods 
bring in but little revenue : they are a luxury 
of which the cost is borne by the aristocracy and 
the gentry — a luxury, like the park and the old 
castle with its coats of arms, that an ancient 
family loves to maintain, along with certain tra- 
ditions, out of respect for itself, and in honour 
of its ancestors. There survives the past of Eng- 
land, there remain the footprints of the genera- 
tions who lived a very similar life in the same 
unchanging landscape. In these country districts, 
where the old unwritten law is as much re- 
spected as the visible boundaries, everything in- 
clines the soul to gravity, and, it may be said, 
even to veneration; a feeling of sanctity seems 
to pervade this soil as that of Japan, and the 
soldier carries this feeling with him when the 



THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 71 

safety of his country is really at stake : there is 
religion in this patriotism as in that of the Rus- 
sians. It is not without reason that the author 
of the well-known pages on France, first pub- 
lished by The Times,^ began his meditations on 
the war with a prelude, in which he conjured 
up a vision of the country-side, and a village 
hushed in the peace of an English Sabbath. And 
it is the same deep spring of feeling and will 
which a certain image of a rural landscape posted 
by the recruiting committee on the walls of all 
the great towns sought to reach. It showed a 
village steeple, some thatched roofs, spikes of pink 
hollyhocks, calm hills asleep in the sun. And as 
a motto this mere question : " Isn't this worth 
fighting for?" 

In my own mind even, there began to revive 
something long forgotten, something of long ago, 
an impression received, no doubt, in childhood 
from this English land. I was sitting under one 
of the venerable oaks, and my eyes, tired with 
London, were resting on the fresh green of the 
ephemeral foliage which had woven itself, as in 
each succeeding spring of the past, around the 
strong and ancient branches. In the luxuriance 
of this new life, in the permanence of the slowly 
built-up form which supports it and subjects it, 
whilst continuously growing and expanding, to a 
certain order, I seemed to see the very image 
of this nation. How many generations have re- 
ceived their being and their law from her enduring 
substance and principle ? How many generations 
^ Ciutton-Brock, Thoughts on the War. 



72 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

have been filled with the pride, the peace and the 
confidence which such rooted strength inspires ? 
Shakespeare's lines came into my mind in which 
he asserts this confidence and disdain of all foreign 
menace, together with the proud and religious love 
for the Christian island home. 

. . . this sceptred isle, 
This fortress, built by Nature and herself 
Against infection and the hand of war, 
This happy breed of men, this little world. 
This precious stone set in the silver sea 
Which serves it in the office of a wall 
Against the env;y of less happy lands. 
This blessed plot, this earth, this England, 
Renowned . , . 
For Christian service and true Chivalry .^ 

1 King Richard II., Act II., Scene 1. 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 



In London, whose boundless life seemed so little 
changed by the war, one single feature, strange 
to a foreigner, and everywhere present, brought 
clearly before the eye at the same time what was 
happening, and one of the root principles of this 
community: its invincible individuaHsm. I refer 
to the unique methods of the recruiting propa- 
ganda, to the picturesque clamour of the posters 
shouting in the ears of the crowd England's need 
and the necessity for enlisting. What other people 
ever sought to raise an army in this fashion? 
When I saw those extraordinary pictures I felt 
once more what every one feels as soon as he 
has crossed the twenty miles of the Channel. I 
felt that this is a country apart — toto divisos orbe 
Britannos — and that it contrasts with every con- 
tinental nation; of this the Englishman has more 
than a suspicion when, to define certain types, 
gestures, expressions and manners, he uses the 
epithet " continental." For one who was trying 
to understand how England was reacting to the 
German attack, the plainest of these posters was 
the most significant, and it bore no picture at all ; 

73 



74 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

nothing but five autograph lines in the delicate, 
slanting writing of Lord Kitchener, followed by 
his signature. There was not a single note of 
exclamation; the tone of this document was as 
simple as its appearance : "I said that I would 
warn the country when more men were needed 
for the war. The moment has arrived. I now 
demand three hundred thousand recruits for the 
new armies. Those who are engaged in the manu- 
facture of war material must not leave their work. 
It is to those who are not doing their duty that 
my appeal is addressed." This brief notice is 
in the same style as the Press advertisements 
publishing the needs of private charitable institu- 
tions : " The Secretary of Hospital informs 

the public that this year's balance sheet shows a 

deficit of £ . Subscriptions may be sent to 

Mr. Z , honorary treasurer." That is all : the 

following day subscriptions begin to flow in. 
These few instances enable us to put our finger on 
the chief social principle of this country, and once 
it is understood, the two strange facts which in 
this war have distinguished England from all other 
belligerents become intelligible : the one is that, 
realising that she had to strain every nerve, she 
did not at once decide in favour of compulsory 
military service — ^the other, that, without im- 
posing this obligation on her citizens, she was 
nevertheless able to raise in a few months several 
millions of soldiers, and this without ever having 
known invasion. 

This fundamental principle — of political and 
religious origin — is that the Englishman, having 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 75 

won his liberty from the central power by an 
age-long effort, and being responsible to God for 
all his acts, alone governs his person and life. 
No doubt the State to-day, having become demo- 
cratic, tends by ever-increasing supervision and 
compulsion to gain more power and authority. 
But these new developments are limited as yet to 
certain forms of control : they are visible chiefly in 
matters of taxation and social hygiene. On the 
whole, in the mind of the Englishman, who has 
been reproached for what Mr. Wells calls State- 
blindness, the ancient principle still survives : 
"self-government" of the individual, and as its 
necessary corollary for most works of public in- 
terest, voluntary association, which in time becomes 
traditional. Such is the idea, now almost instinc- 
tive, which has created, and supports, so many 
institutions and active societies, so many organs of 
political and social life, which are not, as in other 
countries, off-shoots from, or departments of, the 
State : schools, colleges, universities, churches, hos- 
pitals, museums, and, a few years ago, regiments 
of " volunteers " and " yeomanry," private bodies 
who had but to give notice to the local magis- 
trate when they wished to meet and drill in the 
public square. To-day may be added to this list 
the Territorial Army, the Special Reserve, and 
the Service Army. It is in the working of asso- 
ciations which have reached the traditional stage 
in local government and administration that are 
to be found the classic examples of a system whose 
constant feature is, like that of everything Eng- 
lish, to be absolutely devoid of system, since it 



76 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

acts almost unconsciously. In these spheres there 
is no supervision on the part of the State, no 
bureaucratic inspection, either secret or public, 
by officials appointed by the central power and 
representing its policy. There is nothing similar 
to our Prefet. This is why, a few months before 
the war, without any interference or active oppo- 
sition on the part of the Government, Sir Edward 
Carson was seen to raise and drill a body of militia 
for the unconcealed purpose of rebellion. But as 
the Home Rule Bill was not yet on the statute 
book this was merely a threat of rebellion, and 
Sir Edward was only using the privilege of every 
Englishman, which is to spread his conviction and, 
so long as he does not transgress established laws, 
to enter freely into association with other men, 
for the purpose of realizing it. Every Sunday, 
about eleven o'clock in the morning, you can see, 
in Hyde Park, near the Marble Arch, this ele- 
mentary and characteristic phenomenon of English 
society can be studied. A man, generally a clerk 
or a shopkeeper, has thought out some religious or 
political idea which, if accepted, will secure the 
salvation of England or of the human race. He has 
dreamt of it for weeks and months; he has told 
it to a friend who now shares his belief : the next 
thing is to spread it amongst the public. They 
take a chair and a big umbrella and go to the 
Park. Each in his turn gets up on the chair and 
tries his best to be eloquent. Often, in order to 
attract an audience, they hire a small harmonium 
and sing : to what extent the Salvation Army 
has used this kind of advertisement every one 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 77 

knows. An idea and a method of the same kind 
are to be found in the flaming recruiting posters. 
In this country, where opinion is supreme, the essen- 
tial thing is always to spread an opinion, with a 
view to start organised and collective action : and 
for this it is necessary to reach the inner con- 
science of the self-governing man, that private and 
secluded sanctum where he finds his motives of 
action, and there to create the emotion from which 
the desired act will spring. And probably, because 
this is the fundamental fact of English social life, 
it is so universally respected. Hence those meet- 
ings, processions and street preachings, which 
seem to the foreigner one of the singular features 
of England. Whatever the idea which draws 
them together, they all prove the " liberty of the 
Subject " to utter the private thought which is 
the principle of his conduct. So long as the 
demonstrators do really govern themselves (and 
they are always presumed to be capable of doing 
so), so long as they are orderly, and do not trespass 
on the liberty or property of others, the State can 
do nothing but watch the proceedings. Such was 
its attitude when, in 1898, the centenary of the 
landing of the French Revolutionary troops was 
celebrated in Ireland, under the tolerant eyes of 
placid policemen. 

Probably unseen precautions had been taken. 
Usually they are dismissed : such agitations are 
a part of the normal life of the country, one may 
almost say of its order, for they comply with 
the limits imposed by the law. Indeed, since the 
ethical ideal of a given society always corresponds 



78 BRITIAN AND THE WAR 

to its type and principle, the special feature of 
the moral code which prevails in this country of 
" self-government " is the supreme value ascribed 
to personal discipline and self-control. Character, 
will-power to govern one's self, individually and 
collectively, that, above all other things, has been 
for generations the object of education in those old 
public schools of the gentry, which are establish- 
ments for physical and moral culture much more 
than for learning, and the example and prestige 
of which inspire all the others — even those new 
secondary schools in town and country, which 
profess to be democratic. Character they make 
a point of developing, by the freedom they allow 
the boy and the responsibility they put upon 
him, and still more deliberately by means of the 
so-called " educative " games which teach him 
" to play for the team," as Kipling would say, 
and such is indeed the essential principle of the 
men he loves and describes.^ 

1 The aristocratic ideals and discipline of physical and moral 
bearing tend by reason of their prestige to inspire the schools of 
another caste. The head mistress of a county secondary school 
told the writer that in these establishments they made it a point to 
have none but ladies of education as teachers (it is well known 
what the word lady means when taken in its strict sense). In 
the same way he was told at Cambridge that the scholars from 
these secondary schools and, originally, sometimes, from board 
schools, are scattered amongst the colleges in order that they 
may be influenced by the higher environment and not trans- 
form the environment in the direction of their original habits. 
In England the type of civilisation, life and manners, which 
tends to spread, comes from above. Looked at from its bad 
side this tendency is called " snobbishness." Kipling says that 
modern England is a democracy of aristocrats ; and Galsworthy 
that England is a mixture of aristocratic and democratic feelings 
incomprehensible to a foreigner. 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 79 

The idea is in its origin religious and puritan 
as well as political. It is, essentially, that a man's 
fate depends on himself alone, for to decide his 
everlasting destiny, no priestly power, no cere- 
mony, no act or formula avails — nothing but his 
conduct, which is decided by his own free and 
responsible will. It is permissible to use every 
effort to persuade this will, to present it with 
motives of action or abstention : it is not per- 
missible to compel it, and its primary duty is to 
resist compulsion. The great puritan poet defines 
it " the unconquerable will not to yield." It is 
the essential part of every human soul, some- 
thing sacred, situated in that inmost recess, that 
central shrine which must remain closed to all 
other men. This accounts for certain character- 
istic features of English life : for instance, a girl 
is always left to herself to receive, accept, or 
refuse a proposal of marriage. If she accepts it 
she will announce her betrothal to her parents, for 
she is her own mistress and responsible to herself 
alone ; she alone has the right to bestow herself, 
and to choose her life for good or ill. It would 
be a "liberty" on the part of her nearest relation 
if they allowed themselves to advise her. In the 
same way it rests with every Englishman to decide 
whether he will give or refuse himself to his 
country. Such a renunciation of his right to him- 
self can be but voluntary. Remember, by the 
way, that the word " obligation," which a French 
mind associates with the commands of morality 
and honour as well as with legal necessity, is 
generally translated into English as "compulsion," 



80 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

so that " military obligation," becoming " com- 
pulsory service," takes on the appearance of en- 
forced slavery. Now to compel an Englishman to 
give up his person, his soul or his conscience, the 
State is powerless. ^ The authority by which he is 
ruled is not outside and above himself, but in him- 
self. It is the silent longing for order, it is the idea 
of the discipline which is necessary when men are 
to work together, and for which he has so strong 
an instinct ; it is, in fact, the cold and imperative 
idea of duty, it is that conscience to which 
Nelson appealed in words so simple, but for the 
Englishman stronger than any proclamation.^ The 
purely pragmatic character which Protestantism 
has taken in England is well known. It has been 
reduced almost to a mere code of ethics, but for 
centuries, during the nineteenth as at the begin- 
ning of the seventeenth, it was the most exacting 
and rigid of all codes. By teaching man that, to 
work out his salvation, he stands alone before an 
omnipotent Judge, Puritanism has cast him back 
upon himself and trained him for self-government. 
And no doubt, if religion in this country has as- 
sumed so individualistic and practical a character, 
the reason is to be found in a deep and natural 
tendency peculiar to this people, for at an early date 

^ It is by a consequence of this principle that, in England, 
to exempt a child from vaccination, the parents have only to 
declare that they have a conscientious objection to it. 

2 A cartoon in T. P^s Weekly (October 1915) showed John 
Bull bowing his head in humiliation, whilst Mr. Lloyd George 
standing before him, corrects Nelson's phrase {England expects 
every man to do his duty) by striking out the word expects and 
replacing it with compels. 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 81 

of its history, its political organisation developed 
in the same direction. The souls were independent 
of the priest, and all the nation, and the individuals 
thereof, were independent of the Crown. England 
had won her charters and her privileges as a free 
city might win them from its liege lord ; England, 
for centuries, had been in the position of a free city 
which has become the property of its burgesses. 
These burgesses were for a long time a strictly 
limited class, an oligarchy, whose rights and 
duties were finally extended in the course of the 
nineteenth century to the whole people. 

From such ancient principles — religious and 
political — special customs and ideas have developed. 
They govern the attitude of the Englishman in 
the face of the national danger, and produce the 
curious solution which England has found for the 
problem of life and death confronting her at the 
hands of an enemy with a strength of ten million 
soldiers. In this country of self-government and 
of voluntary association, the commonweal appears 
really to each man as his private weal. " Who 
cleared the land of England ? Who made it in- 
habitable, who laid the foundations of its institu- 
tions ? Your forefathers. Who made it what it 
is? Your fathers. Who must defend it? You, 
in order to transmit it to your children." No 
mystic personality Hke Holy Russia, no despotic 
idol like Germany, no ideal maternal figure like 
France, is this England. Rather an old ancestral 
estate, rich in relics and memories of the past, 



82 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

in which the present generation has a hfe interest 
whilst the land itself belongs beforehand to the 
next, like the estates and castles of the aristocracy. 
Every Englishman is expected to look after that 
estate, his Country, just as he looks after his 
church, his parish, his town, or those charities 
in which he is interested, those societies of which 
he is a member ; if he supports them so generously, 
if very often he leaves them, at the expense of his 
children, an important part of his fortune, it is 
because they have become — and sometimes more 
than his own children — a living part of himself. 
It was no sense of social justice but some such 
feeling which prompted the oligarchy in 1806 to 
vote, and themselves to assume almost all the 
burden of, that "income tax" which even that 
great Liberal and friend of the people, Mr. Glad- 
stone, always longed to abolish, and which Mr. 
Lloyd George has so well developed and made use 
of for his democratic purposes. In the same way, 
by virtue of the Poor Law, the aristocracy paid all 
the rates, and supported the poor of the parishes of 
which they were, by birth, patrons and magistrates. 
The notion is inborn in the Englishman that his 
position in the community where he has property, 
and one or more votes (not many Englishmen had 
votes in 1806), is that of a shareholder to his com- 
pany, that he is a " part -proprietor of the empire." 
The State above him is not the abstract, omnipo- 
tent, distant power which alone manages public 
affairs, to which we were accustomed by Louis XIV 
and Napoleon. More or less clearly, he feels that 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 83 

the State (a word less commonly used than its 
French equivalent) is himself. Even at the present 
day, in case of riots or disorderly strikes, this 
feeling makes it incumbent on a gentleman to enrol 
himself a " special constable " and go, truncheon 
in hand, to defend the peace of his own street 
against the rioters.^ 

Soldiers enlisted on the voluntary system are 
but special constables enrolled against the national 
enemy. As a result of this old tradition the young 
men of the aristocracy, gentry, and upper middle 
class, at once came forward at the beginning of 
the war. Such was the force of opinion round 
them, that none of military age could have re- 
frained without dishonour. In these classes there 
is not a family which has not given its sons ; and 
most of them are in mourning.^ But to the new 
democracy this duty had to be taught, for they 
had not been prepared for it by any previous 
experience, and their representatives hesitated to 
make it a legal obligation. They had received 

1 Speaking to the masters and workmen of the metal in- 
dustries on the question of munitions, Mr. Lloyd George said, 
on June 4, 1915, at Liverpool : "I ask you to form yourselves 
into a committee of management for the organisation of the 
industrial resources of this district, so as to obtain the maximum 
of production. To the business men of this community, I say : 
Look on this business as your own. It is not the Government 
which is entering into negotiations with you. You are the 
Government. Your interests are involved in this enterprise, 
and I say the same to the workmen. It is also their 
business. . . ." 

2 At the University of Cambridge alone, whose students are 
recruited almost exclusively from the classes referred to, it was 
estimated on October 25, 1915, that 10,250 students and former 
students had enlisted [Cambridge Review). 



84 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

no mandate from the country so to do ; besides, 
to deprive the " subject " of the free possession 
of his own person, to compel his obedience, is 
held, in this country of *' Habeas Corpus," as 
contrary, not only to all precedents, but to the 
" spirit of the constitution " ; finally, since the 
peril was not yet evident to all, the ancient 
instincts of independence rose against the im- 
position of such a servitude : Britons never, never 
will he slaves ! The question has not even been 
raised, of applying compulsory service to Ireland. 
And in Celtic, industrial, democratic Wales there 
has been reason to fear riots, such as broke out 
amongst a people of similar traditions, when 
Lincoln, in the course of the American Civil 
War, attempted to enforce military service. Yet 
even amongst these miners of Wales, so jealous of 
their interests and their rights, there were found, 
before the tenth month of the war, more than 
sixty thousand ready to assume freely this servi- 
tude as soon as the word " duty " was uttered. 



II 

Through all England, day after day, the appeal 
rang out an alarm bell to stir the country, and 
drag men out of the rut " business as usual; " to 
spread far and wide the impression of a great and 
immediate public danger. This was the business 
chiefly of the great newspapers to whose patriotic 
pessimism we have already referred. Then came 
the continuous, urgent exhortation to every young 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 85 

man's conscience, an indefatigable propaganda of 
meetings, sermons, processions, open-air speeches, 
and all the activity of recruiting sergeants. The 
root idea was that a man should enlist just as he 
might join the Salvation Army, by virtue of a 
certain working of his mind, a new conviction, 
a perception of good and evil, justice and in- 
justice, awakened in him by this active and well- 
organised campaign. The moral, protestant and 
puritanic character of this campaign was apparent 
from a first glance at the picture posters which 
covered the walls. They mark in one's memory 
for ever the profound crisis in the English national 
conscience. Through all their gaudiness one word 
incessantly recurs : Duty. The feeling of impera- 
tive duty is the suggestion aimed at by all these 
pictures, that form a matchless document on the 
inner nature of the English soul. Here, for example, 
is the familiar face, so shrewd, clear-sighted, soldier- 
like — as Kipling said, " the war-wise face " — of Lord 
Roberts, with his piercing glance, his air of pre- 
cision telling of strength and voluntary discipline, 
of faithfulness and services loyally accomplished. 
And, beneath it, this motto : " He did his duty ; 
will you do yours ? " Here is the more massive 
and authoritative face of Lord Kitchener, looking 
straight into yours with steel grey eyes ; his finger, 
raised imperiously, points at you; he utters the 
words printed on the bill : " Your Country wants 
You ! " To stimulate conscience, the old devices 
of the great Methodist preachers are resorted to. 
In every individual of his congregation Wesley 



86 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

endeavoured to create the sensation that to him 
personally he was speaking, that for him person- 
ally Christ died. The very same method is adopted 
by the soldiers and recruiting officers who stand 
up in motor-cars to address the crowd. I remem- 
ber how one of these, a soldier back from the 
front, turned suddenly to some tall lads in caps, 
and pointing to a woman with two children cling- 
ing to her, cried : " For the women and children 
I am ready to go and fight again ! but you, why 
should I go and risk my life for you? " In such 
manner a hundred pictures and mottos, on every 
wall, clamour at the passer-by. Here is a fine lad 
in khaki standing on a foreshortened map of 
Flanders, a clean-limbed, beaming young English- 
man crying to every Englishman of his own age, 
with a wave of his cap : " Come and do your 
bit ! " He who has ever stopped to watch in 
Holborn or the Strand a regiment march past, 
with its drums and fifes, will understand that poster 
of a crowd gaping at the fine new troops, proud, 
smart and trim — and the words underneath : 
" Don't stay with the loafers, come and join the 
men ! " The young married man and father, who 
has come to the conclusion that his duty is to stay 
behind, working for his wife and children, has to 
face the picture of a middle class family man 
sitting hang-dog in his armchair, because his little 
boy of ten is innocently putting this question : 
" What were you doing, father, during the Great 
War?" Or else the appeal is to the girls and 
women; for love in England has always kept a 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 87 

romantic, Christian, moral, idealistic flavour; a 
certain dreamy and poetic sentimentalism in the 
ethics of this people has associated it with long 
engagements and the ideals and laws of chivalry. 
Probably these appeals to the women of England 
were suggested by Ruskin's words : "It is from 
your lips that men learn their ideals of duty. 
Tell them to be brave and for you they will be 
brave ! " ^ Take for example that symbolistic 
picture of a young Englishwoman standing at a 
window, who, with an imperious gesture, utters 
the single word : " Go ! " and down below a squad 
of fine young fellows are seen swinging out on the 
march. If you are not well up in the manners 
of this country you may be a little startled by 
the following catechism : "Is your best boy in 
khaki ? If not, why not ? If he doesn't consider 
that you and his country are worth fighting for, 
do you think him worthy of you ? Don't pity the 
girls you see going out walking alone. Probably 
their young men are in the ranks, fighting for 
them, for England and for you. If yours neglects 
his duty to his king and his country, the day 
may come, perhaps, when he will neglect you. 
Think of that and ask him to enlist to-day'* 
Sometimes the appeal is to the experienced woman, 
the wife and mother : with what seriousness, with 
what a methodical setting forth of practical and 
moral arguments she is asked to reflect and to 
influence her men-folk. " To the women of Great 
Britain : (1) Have you read what the Germans 
1 Crown of Wild Olive, p. 129. 



88 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

did when they invaded Belgium? Have you 
asked yourself what they would do if they in- 
vaded your country? (2) Do you understand 
clearly that your homes, your daughters, are 
threatened if you do not find more soldiers at 
once? (3) Do you understand that the single 
word ' Go ! ' uttered by you may send a man to 
fight for his king and country ? (4) When the war 
is over, if it is asked whether your husband or 
your son was in it, must he keep silent because 
you would not let him go ? (5) Will you not help 
to send a man to the army to-day ? " 

Will you not help ? The very same words of 
appeal we have so often read in the tracts of 
religious, moral, charitable institutions — a prosaic 
but fervent appeal to free will, to good will, to 
the spirit of association and co-operation for the 
improvement of the world. Not in the style of 
some State department, but as the living voice 
of men of English blood appealing for their cause, 
this charge, with its numbered arguments, its 
medley of ethics and common sense, its stodgy 
earnestness, is a revelation of the soul of a people. 
A slow, inartistic people (they themselves say " un- 
imaginative "), impervious to the powers of elo- 
quence, but to be moved profoundly by con- 
viction and feeling — above all a people with a 
strong sense of duty, who have made conscience 
the essence of their poetry and religion, and thus, 
although reacting chiefly to the facts of experience 
and reality — not forgetting that reality, the soul — 
are capable of a world of dreamy mysticism. By 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 89 

appealing to conscience, by stimulating its slow 
meditation on right and wrong, by means of a 
silent working of the mind, all English reforms 
have been accomplished. Thus in the sixteenth 
century came Reformation, in the eighteenth 
Abolition of Slavery, in the nineteenth Catholic 
Emancipation, extension of the Franchise, Aboli- 
tion of the Rotten Boroughs; and, as the result 
of the feeling of remorse and " social compunc- 
tion " roused by Carlyle and Ruskin, that com- 
pulsory legislation for the benefit of Labour in 
which England gave the lead to Europe. Thus, 
too, for the last twelve or fifteen years, has 
Socialism itself, in England always closely allied 
with the dreams of religion and puritanism, been 
making progress. Very similar — and this is the 
nearest example — was the origin and development 
of those agitations for moral reform which have 
attracted men of good will in tens and hundreds 
of thousands, such bands of crusaders as the 
Young Men's Christian Association, the Bands 
of Hope, the Salvation Army and, above all, 
the great Temperance Leagues. The methods 
of persuasion, the motives, the mental operations 
which induce a young Englishman to enlist for 
the duration of the present war, are precisely of 
the same kind as those by which he is brought to 
sign a temperance pledge. It is ingrained in him 
that such an act ought only to be spontaneous, 
since the individual belongs to himself alone and 
has the sole right to choose in life the right or 
wrong which will determine his everlasting destiny. 



90 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

So we have on one side the good constantly aspiring 
towards the better; on the other, the lukewarm, 
indifferent and cowardly, on whom the others 
look askance. This is so true that one of the 
arguments used against Conscription is that volun- 
teers would decline to serve by the side of men who 
had to be compelled.^ 

But if the question which is being put to so 
many consciences is simple, the answer is not 
always easy. To defend one's country, to take 
up arms against an enemy who is the Devil 
Incarnate, is no doubt a duty, but does it take 
precedence over all other duties ? ^ Take a man 
with children or parents dependent on him who 
has slowly risen to his post in some bank or 
office. The war, according to Lord Kitchener, 
may last three years. Ought he to go and give 
up his place, which cannot be kept empty, and 
which another man, less conscientious than him- 
self, will occupy? Or, again, take a manufac- 
turer, whose firm, if he enlists, will go under, to 

^ These pages had been written for several weeks when I 
received (January 10, 1916) from an English volunteer, who 
enlisted at the age of forty, a letter in which this feeling is ex- 
pressed : " All reductions made, the law of Conscription will 
give us half a million beastly conscripts. I hope they will get 
sat on hard during their training. I only wish I were one of 
their officers. But I wouldn't like to go into the trenches with 
them. I hope we shall get a good nickname for them. You 
know what the Territorials, those who refuse to go on foreign 
service, are called : ' The Royal Standbacks.'- " 

* " I don't come here to say : ' Go and join ^ to a man who 
may have a sick mother. ... I say honestly that my wife is 
more to me than my country, but not when my country is in 
danger." — Speech of Mr. iSeymour Hicks at a recruiting meeting 
in London, October 8. 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 91 

the advantage of rivals not so scrupulous of duty ; 
or an engineer in a firm which is indirectly aiding 
in the production of war material ; or a farmer 
who says to himself that England cannot do 
without forage, wheat and cattle. These are no 
easy questions to settle for oneself. I myself 
became cognisant of a rather pathetic case of 
this kind : A young man, twenty -three years old, 
had succeeded, through the death of his father, to a 
farm of twelve hundred acres, on which half a village 
— fifteen or twenty labourers — ^found employment. 
He was anxious to enlist ; but his mother insisted 
on his remaining, for if he went it seemed to her 
that the whole work of the farm must stop. In 
the country, vfhere the village labourer has been 
for centuries so inferior and so dependent, the 
presence of a master on the farm seems indis- 
pensable. To doubt in such a case would seem 
astonishing to a Frenchman, since from his birth 
up, for the last forty years, his duty has been made 
plain to him by a universal and all-embracing law. 
But we cannot wonder that an Englishman should 
be perplexed, suddenly finding himself faced with 
the necessity of answering, at once and alone, such 
a question, especially when he sees other English- 
men deciding in the negative.^ 

^ That is why, in a letter addressed individually to every 
Englishman (October 15, 1915), Lord Derby, Director General of 
Recruiting, gave as a criterion the following : " Sir, — ^May I beg 
you to ask yourself this question : Have I done everything that I 
could to defend the safety of my country ? " and in a letter 
addressed to the Mayor of Leicester, and published by the whole 
Press, he added this second question : "Would the excuse which 
I am making be valid in a country possessing Conscription ? '* 



92 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

Instinctively he looks for a precedent : If the 
duty is undeniable, why is it so new? Why is it 
not set forth in the Bible, or by law? Learning 
of the presence of a Frenchman, this young man 
came to see me (every Frenchman was then readily 
believed, in England, to be a specialist in war 
matters) : he wanted to know whether service 
was really compulsory for every man in France; 
how much was left of the German Army in the 
tenth month of the war; and, above all, whether 
the English forces then in France were sufficient. 
I had been told that he wanted to ask my advice. 
He took good care not to ; but I saw clearly that 
he was trying to feel his way to a decision. Later 
on, from a lady in the neighbourhood, I heard of 
his mother's opposition, and that after a month he 
had joined the army. 

Such an act, like a religious conversion, is the 
final outcome of a deep working of the mind.^ 
The whole process resembles in its methods and 
phenomena those of the Methodist revivals ; ^ 
the converted become converters, and prose- 
lytes spring up all at once from the opposing 

^ The Daily Chronicle published (October 9) a fine poem by 
Mr. Harold Begbie, urging men to do their duty. Here is 
the first stanza — 

" Fight it out in your heart, my lad, 
It's time for the final wrench ; 
Home has its arms about your neck, 
But conscience points to the trench.'-* 

^ The methods of Lord Derby were so exactly like those of a 
religious revival that the phrase became current, the Lord Derby 
Revival or the recruiting revival. 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 93 

ranks. For the matter does not end with the 
circulation of impersonal pamphlets and posters : 
officers and men turn themselves into recruiting 
agents; disabled soldiers go and speak at meet- 
ings; women, devoted propagandists of the idea 
which is robbing them of their sons and husbands, 
whip up their canvassing proclivities, and go out 
lecturing or stir up in their homes the indifferent 
and hesitating. In the country, where the moral 
authority of the gentry is enlisted in service of 
the cause, the ladies of the manor house head 
the movement. In the manufacturing districts 
leaders of the Labour Party, such as Will Crooks, 
Ben Tillett and Hodge, and representatives of the 
trade unions who have been taken to the front by 
the military authorities, set to work to convince 
the men of their class in English fashion by anec- 
dotes, facts, and illustrations taken from their own 
actual experience. To the workmen they speak, 
above all, of the need of munitions, and it is 
especially to the sense of justice, so strong in this 
nation, that they appeal. " Is it fair " that able- 
bodied Britons should remain at home whilst their 
brothers spend their nights in the trenches, risking 
defeat and death ? Is it fair that bachelors should 
avoid the danger which married men have gone to 
face ? Is it fair, they kept on saying in June, after 
the deficiencies of the artillery had been revealed, 
that their comrades should be left to die under 
avalanches of shells because English workmen 
are on strike, or refuse to alter the union rules 
which restrict the speed of production? One bill 



94 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

especially laid bare the injustice of this contrast. 
In the top half of the poster artillerymen under 
the bursting shells of the enemy stand powerless 
or lie dying on their guns; the open ammunition 
wagons are empty. Beneath is another picture : 
workmen in caps smoking their pipes, with their 
arms crossed, in front of a public-house. In the 
distance is the gate of a factory — closed. 

To appeal to the eye, to incite to action by 
pictures, to multiply the pictures indefinitely, and 
by their ever-present suggestion to create auto- 
matic mental habits, general currents of uncon- 
scious imitation, what else is this but the very 
principle and method of advertising? And the 
most singular thing about this propaganda is that 
in spirit it is puritan, but in method commer- 
cial; the blending of these two characteristics is 
one of the most original features of the modern 
English mind (one might even say, taking America 
into consideration, of the Anglo-Saxon mind). It 
dates from the close of the eighteenth century, 
when modern mechanical industry began together 
with the evangelical and Methodist revival. For 
the last hundred and fifty years the special activi- 
ties of " business," absorbing as they do the vast 
majority of the men from early youth, have helped 
as much as political institutions and a strict, indi- 
vidualistic religion to mould the soul and intellect 
of this people. They are a nation not of State 
servants, not of soldiers, but of free business men. 
For the essence of business is liberty — liberty of 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 95 

prices, of supply and demand, of competition in all 
its forms. It is the influence of commerce which 
quickly developed amongst the English one of 
their most characteristic ideas — ^the principle of 
laisser-faire. Favoured by the ancient instincts 
of personal independence, strengthened by habits 
of self-government and by the puritan ethics which 
isolate the individual and throw him upon him- 
self, this principle has spread from the purely 
economic sphere in which the Manchester school, 
with its tendency to Nonconformity, was its repre- 
sentative, to the whole community : Bible and 
Free Competition — this formula sums up nine- 
teenth-century England. It followed naturally the 
English instinctive idea that, at all events in the 
social sphere, things tend spontaneously to find 
their equilibrium, shape and perfect development ; 
that they are alive, and only need to be allowed 
to live ; — and, indeed, in the sphere of ethics this 
same conception is expressed in the injunction, 
live and let live. Thus arose, without supervision 
or direction from any powerful, long-sighted 
and paternal State, in complete contrast to the 
German process, the wealth, greatness and power 
of England. This principle, no doubt, is corrected 
to-day by new and growing socialistic ideals, but 
it still has power over the mind, and governs old 
habits. It is a very important factor in the 
peculiar method of foreign policy which Mr. 
Asquith summed up in the formula, " Wait and 
see " ; it also accounts a good deal for the vague 
notion which only yesterday, and at the most 



96 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

critical period of the war, was very widely preva- 
lent, that success was possible without a universal 
effort, without any systematic plan controlled by 
the authorities, and that once more everything 
would come all right. It is largely responsible, 
therefore, for the delay of the country in organ- 
ising itself industrially for the war ; but more for 
the resistance still opposed to the apostles of con- 
scription, a resistance which perhaps is not to 
be overcome. For the idea which creates that 
opposition is seen to be, as the necessity for con- 
scription becomes more pressing, more and more 
deeply ingrained in the EngUsh mind and bound 
up with the very principles of English society. 

But every vital organism adapts itself in some 
way or other to its environment, turning to un- 
foreseen uses those very organs and instincts which 
seemed more particularly to expose it to danger; 
and so these commercial habits, so opposed to 
the idea of militarism, have given birth to the 
ingenious expedient which has served more than 
anything else to create so quickly an army 
on the continental scale. Through this same 
general law of adjustment, a society in which 
no public action can be undertaken except if 
public opinion requires it has found methods to 
organise and accelerate the development of that 
opinion. The chief of these methods is simply to 
advertise, and to use the most modern kind of 
advertisement — incessant, omnipresent — with all 
its ingenuity in giving infinite variety to its ap- 
peals, with the original and strong colouring and 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 97 

the humour which in England often makes it so 
picturesque. Its appHcation to politics was already 
familiar : brass bands, big drums, blue and orange 
ribbons, songs, flower-decked carriages, proces- 
sions, sky signs and cinema films of the polHng 
days. It had also been applied to religion : tam- 
bourines and trombones, of the Methodist revivals 
and the Salvation Army. Now it was pressed into 
the service of patriotism : fifes and drums, through 
the streets of the main traffic where the new re- 
cruits are marched, followed by such as gape at the 
arrival of a circus troupe; parades in the open 
squares, to the music of bands, whilst recruiting 
officers harangue the people from their motor-cars ; 
flags, flowers, gaudy pictures of the attesting offices 
resembling, in their gay and startling effects, and 
the vulgar joviality of their appeal, the methods 
of the cheap-jack. The advertising campaign is 
almost American in its style. True that when 
Lord Kitchener demanded three hundred thousand 
new volunteers, his call to the country appeared 
on every wall in all its fine simplicity — the 
English soul is sensitive to a purely moral beauty 
of this kind. But that was not enough. The 
crowd — which in this country is simple and 
unsophisticated — must be impressed with the 
direct, physical sensation of urgency. On the 
front screen of every taxi in London appeared 
all at once, in big letters, this announcement : 
" 300,000 more men wanted at once.'' As they 
were seen rushing in every direction with this 
poster, the illusion was produced that they were 

H 



98 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

driving at that pace to carry the urgent news 
quicker to every quarter of the town — nay, that 
there and then they were engaged in seeking 
the three hundred thousand volunteers. To stir 
up the public into thinking that the purchase 
of a certain article cannot be put off, and must 
be effected that very minute, to drive the on- 
looker to act upon the suggested idea whilst it 
is still quite fresh, is one of the new devices in 
advertising which the American masters of that 
art have taught the English. To-day ! enlist to- 
day ! Send your man to-day ! seems to sound 
from every wall; and on the man in the street, 
whose average and rather plastic mind is easily 
impressed, these loud, short, clear injunctions 
act with great suggestive force. Another means, 
which also comes from the United States, where 
the hypnotisation of the public has been de- 
veloped into a fine art, is to put on, when 
addressing it, a tone of conviction, a sort of 
jovial vitality, which allures as well as com- 
mands. Any one who has heard young clergymen 
and dissenting ministers preaching, or attended 
meetings of Salvationists, Temperance Societies, 
and the Y.M.C.A., knows how skilfully the mis- 
sionaries of religion and morality, once so severe 
and gloomy in their bearing, avail themselves to- 
day of these effective devices. They are now 
used for the great conversion campaign which 
is to induce the young men of England to enter 
on a new path in life. Inspiring pictures of fine 
khaki soldiers, looking straight into your face with 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 99 

such clear eyes of health ! They have found faith 
and salvation. Do they not seem to possess the 
secret of happiness, and to promise it to others? 
How they seem to call the man in the street — ^the 
dull and slow civilian — to share in the freedom 
from care, the lightness of their hearts which 
comes from duty nobly done ! " Put on the 
king's uniform ! Join us, boys ! " they seem to 
shout, gaily beckoning us as we pass. It is enough 
to recall the little coloured bill which showed 
three young Highlanders arm in arm, striding 
buoyantly along, as if about to dance a fling. 
What joy of life in the smooth faces of these 
lads of twenty, with their clean and radiant 
smile I They were the flower of a nation, a 
flower not yet full-blown, pathetic, offering itself, 
innumerable, in all its brilhance, grace and joy 
to the blind scythe of war. And that print 
was only meant to attract, to allure. Others of 
less beauty, some of which were criticised as 
vulgar, were to me no less touching : they seemed 
to appeal to that English spirit of courage and 
reticence which seeks to hide emotion beneath 
humour, and prefers a joke to a fine saying. There 
was a bill, for instance, representing a group of 
horses galloping along the race -course, with jockeys 
dressed in the colours of the belligerent powers. 
The short motto read : " Sign on for the Grand 
International Final ! " 

Strange words, these, at a moment when this 
country — so proud a country, the heir of such a 



100 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

splendid past, conscious always of that for which 
she stands on this planet and in human history — 
is mortally threatened by the bitterest, the most 
insolent, and the strongest foe she has ever known. 
The foreigner is inclined to smile if he does not 
know England well, and the style of these appeals 
is disliked by many travelled Enghshmen who 
think they see the impression made abroad. But 
under all this, he who knows perceives the bed- 
rock character of the nation which this crisis, by 
the very intensity of the collective and necessary 
effort, is revealing more clearly than ever before. 
That character is a combination of will and con- 
science : the inviolable will of the individual who 
has sole control of himself; the conscience which 
meditates in silence, stirs to action, and ordains 
the sacrifice. For, make no mistake about it, 
whatever the style of the propaganda (and as I 
have said : of the advertisements), the man who, 
resolving to " fight for his king," comes to a 
recruiting office to utter and sign that old re- 
ligious form : "I swear before Almighty God to 
serve in all allegiance, honestly and faithfully, as 
in duty boimd, his Majesty George V, his heirs 
and successors, and to defend them in their person, 
their Crown and their dignity against all enemies, 
in obedience to the generals and officers placed 
over me — and so help me God 1 " — ^that man knows 
what risks he faces ; he has read the story of Mons 
and of Le Cateaux, of the Yser and of Ypres, of 
Neuve Chapelle and of La Bassee; knows about 
the avalanches of shrapnel and of Jack Johnsons, 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE 101 

the liquid flames and the poison gas; knows the 
number and proportion of the slain; knows of 
friends who will never return. Three millions of 
young Englishmen chose to accept this risk, to- 
gether with military discipline and servitude, and 
one by one they came to take the solemn pledge 
because, without any intrusion upon their free will, 
appeal had been made to their conscience. 

Such an act of a people is unexampled in his- 
tory, and when perceived in its whole reality, 
when ''' realised,'' as the English say, we feel that 
it partakes of the sublime. For me, the impres- 
sion of it all is bound up with the memory of an 
incident which symbolically condensed into one 
small picture a moral act of tremendous signifi- 
cance and magnitude. It was Sunday : we had 
just been visiting a training camp in the north of 
London; with us there got into the train a young 
girl and an old man, who through the window took 
a prolonged farewell of a soldier from the camp — 
and then, silent and motionless, sat down in front 
of us. The man had the long, narrow face and 
beard, the black and threadbare frock-coat of a 
dissenting minister of the old school. The girl, 
also, was clad in pure black; her pale, thin face 
had the intense fixed expression, the compressed 
lips which we usually associate with puritanism. 
Those lips seemed never to have opened in a smile ; 
she was wearing round her neck, on the common 
woollen material of her blouse, a strange, gilt, 
heraldic ornament, a sort of brooch, of unusual 
width, which all at once I recognised as one of 



102 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

those regimental badges worn on officers' caps. 
Then I understood : she was in mourning ; and 
this badge was a reHc, worn with proud piety, no 
doubt in memory of a brother. The train was 
already in motion, and both remained sitting very 
upright without word or movement. Then the 
lips of the young girl opened, and addressing the 
old man, she spoke a few words which I should, 
probably, have failed to catch if I hadn't been 
watching her mouth : " We've given our four. Con- 
scription may come ; we can't do more.'' 

October 1915. 



THE MEN 

Thus were raised those new legions of England, 
whose ever-increasing numbers, and — we can now 
say, too — whose technical efficiency, are for the 
enemy one of the most deadly surprises of the 
war. He thought he had foreseen every material 
contingency : the appearance of such an army 
is one of the largest and most decisive of con- 
tingencies. But then it had its origin in spiritual 
realities, and the methodical enemy has shown 
himself hopelessly bhnd to all that comes within 
that category. 

That spiritual reality, of which he ought to have 
taken note, was simply — the English mind. We 
have seen it with all its special characteristics in 
the methods employed to create the armies. The 
armies themselves, in their appearance, their spirit, 
their manners, their organisation, reveal it by evi- 
dence still more direct. All that is best and 
deepest in England, all that is most profoundly 
national in the soul of this people is seen to 
demonstration in the ranks of these armies. 

The old regular army was recruited from the 
lower castes — such a word may be used in reference 
to a country in which class distinctions have re- 
mained so sharp. Men enlisted in the street — 

103 



104 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

often at the tavern door — had been passed over 
by the really civilising influences in England ; and 
their peculiar environment during seven years in 
barracks developed in them a special professional 
type. But in the new troops the type is truly 
English. For they spring from the very heart of 
the country ; they are formed from its noblest and 
most active substance ; and not so merely because 
these soldiers are volunteers whose hearts the 
thought of their country has stirred, but because 
they almost all belong to those classes in which 
the national ideals and traditions are kept up — 
either to the flower of the working class steeped 
in Enghsh Protestantism (in the early days of the 
war too many skilled artisans left foundry and 
forge for the regiment), or to the middle classes, 
the professional classes and the landed gentry. 
The influence of these last was especially strong 
in forming the spirit and characteristics of the 
New Armies. They gave the tone because they 
set the example, and we know what their prestige 
stifl is. At all times they, more than any others, 
have been the England, which they have ruled, 
and for which they stood in the eyes of foreigners ; 
before all they were the incarnation of the Enghsh 
ideas, taught in undiluted rigour, along with the 
educative games in their pubHc schools and univer- 
sities. Enghsh disciphne, English religion, Enghsh 
traditions, together with the incessant suggestions 
of Enghsh social hfe, have fixed their type — a type 
of body and mind, clearly outlined as a medal 
struck from a die, which the foreigner recognises at 
a glance beneath all its individual varieties. Fine, 



THE MEN 105 

well-built lads ("true to type," as the English say), 
simple-minded and healthy, brought up to fresh 
air, hardened by their games, able to endure 
fatigue and bear up against suffering, and yet 
(or so it seems to a foreigner), rather particular 
about bodily comforts, because certain conditions 
of life seem to them — and still more to all those 
who unconsciously take them as models — ^to form 
part of what they owe to themselves, to be their 
due. They are willing to go and be shot like 
gentlemen; and like gentlemen they insist on 
shaving every morning. 

Psychologically their type is clearly marked. 
By nature they are slow : their worth lies chiefly 
in the grip of their will, their steady nerves, in the 
deep seriousness which is hidden beneath their 
good temper and their humour, and in the quality 
of a self-restraint imposed by conscience. Their 
education, their schooling at all its stages, has 
strengthened this natural tendency and disposition. 
It has been much more a moral than an intel- 
lectual training, for to be a gentleman as each is, 
or wishes to be,^ is in the first place a matter of 
spirit and conscience. Three hundred years of 
strict, biblical Protestantism have inseparably 
linked the idea of duty with the superhuman 
authority which is expressed by the word God — a 
word they do not lightly utter, because the old 
Commandment has been taken literally, and the 

1 " Every man in England is a gentleman," said Mr. Sey- 
mour Hicks to the crowd in a recruiting speech (October 8, 
1916). 



106 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

solemn emotions which it awakens belong to the 
innermost and most guarded part of a man's soul. 
To keep one's self to oneself, never to utter one's 
deepest and most serious feelings, is a character- 
istic of the English soul; but some letters have 
been published, written by wounded men to their 
beloved, some poems have been left behind by 
the dead (Julian Grenfell, Rupert Brooke, Charles 
Sorley), which are enough to show — if, indeed, all 
the poetry of this nation, from Milton to Kipling, 
had not already made it clear — ^to what lyrical 
heights the silent idea of duty and sacrifice can 
exalt their souls. As a rule, such utterance comes 
only when the man is alone with God or in the 
face of death. ^ In society he is trained to show 
nothing but that social nature which is super- 
imposed on his personal and genuine nature in 
order to repress it. He is governed by the rules 
of the social code, the first of which is to conform 
as closely as possible to the general type : curious 
rules, vigorously enforced from school days, forbid- 
ding the gestures of emotion — of nature itself — 
and all expressions of originality. This is the sort 
of discipline that has given him what contem- 
porary English moralists have somewhat unjustly 

^ Or else in the uttermost intimacies. Here is an extract from 
a letter written by a young man to his betrothed : " You will 
hear nothing from me for a week or a fortnight, perhaps longer. 
Don't worry. Look on me as I look on myself : as an abstrac- 
tion, a part of the Great Soul struggling for salvation, its own 
and that of the world. I am no longer a person with private 
joys and sorrows. Nor are you either" {Graphic, October 30, 
1915). See Appendix A. 



THE MEN 107 

called " English insincerity." By it he is made 
to fit into that social convention in which every 
Englishman has his being, and which forbids him 
to give himself away — ever to reveal the deepest 
and most passionate movements of his inner self, 
forbids him in short to " gush " ; and further 
forbids him to uncover and gaze on certain aspects 
and regions of reality, especially the seamy side of 
life and of society (the ugliness, hypocrisy, dirt 
and vice, the skulls and crossbones, darkness and 
depths that lie beneath the face of things), and, 
if perchance he has looked on them, forbids him 
to tell what he has seen. For the convention 
which supposes that everything is healthy, well- 
ordered, and has its moral root and sufficient 
cause of being in an underlying mystery which 
shall not be probed — ^that convention is supposed 
to be needful to the health, the order and the 
happiness of individuals and of the community. 
By thus eliminating every recognition of tragic 
elements, this social discipline tends more and 
more to make life appear a game, a game which 
must be played with humour and detachment; 
and the excessive devotion to sport acts in the 
same direction. The underlying principle of these 
rules is a certain instinctive horror of nervous 
disease and lack of social balance, of morbidity; 
but they have drawbacks which the new Eng- 
lish critics of England had been denouncing and 
satirising for ten years before the war. Of these 
not the least is that such rules impose on men, 
in their social relations, an optimistic convention. 



108 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

make them always say verbally — and in the long 
run believe mentally — ^that the less is the greater ; 
and end, in the majority of cases, by blinding 
them completely to the necessities and dangers of 
reality, and so prevent them from adapting them- 
selves to meet these dangers. There can be no 
doubt that the set intention of maintaining an 
unperturbed appearance — one might almost say of 
shutting one's eyes to danger — had much to do 
with the slowness of the English in facing first the 
threat, and then the reality, of the war. But 
once the peril makes itself clearly seen, once it 
rises insistent and imminent in deadly shape, the 
secret element of stoicism hidden beneath this in- 
culcated optimism reveals itself. For if one probes 
to the core of this English code, one finds there 
always a moral force, a determination to resist 
whatever misfortune may come along — a " no " 
opposed to all enfeebling and disintegrating emo- 
tion. How many families has not the war cast 
into mourning? They are expected to be silent, 
one might say, to hide their grief. Grief belongs 
to privacy : there let it stay ! In society the social 
side of man should alone be seen, with the smile 
and the manners of society. This rule counts for 
much in that appearance of tranquillity, of in- 
difference to the war, of " life as usual " which, 
but yesterday, England presented to a foreign eye ; 
it goes far, too, in accounting for that seeming 
carelessness — one might even say frivolity (" ils 
ne sont pas serieux") — at which some of us, who 
had seen the English at the front, sometimes 



THE MEN 109 

wondered. They could die in the most heroic 
manner, but would rather go through the retaking 
of a trench than give up their five o'clock tea; 
whilst behind the lines they went on playing foot- 
ball. On the whole, they seemed to regard the 
war much as a football match and looked more 
like sportsmen than soldiers.^ 

Such, indeed, they are, and must be. The 
same creed which leaves the Englishman entirely to 
himself, to his conscience and his religion when 
it's a question of accepting suffering or death, 
forces him, in the presence of others, to use terms 
and manners which are almost those of sport. 
We have already pointed out that some of the 
ideas associated with this word to-day by the 
English are entirely moral. It is significant that 
the phrase, " play the game," is tending more 
and more to replace the old expression, " do your 
duty " — and for the reason that in daily life all 
over -serious words and attitudes are avoided. 
Play the game — so the word goes ; play it strictly, 
according to the rules, all together, carefully 
making yourself as much like the others as pos- 
sible (for, by a curious yet quite comprehensible 
paradox, the most individualistic of nations is, 
at the same time, the most gregarious), working 
patiently, honourably for your team, showing 
up as little as you can yourself, keeping your 
mouth shut if you get a kick, smiling if your eye 

^ The English papers related that at the Battle of Loos 
(September 1915) a Highlander was seen charging the enemy, 
kicking a football in front of him. 



110 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

is blacked (the first rule of boxing), preserving, in 
a crisis, a humorous and conversational tone, and 
never seeming to take yourself seriously. " Sign on 
for the Grand International Final 1 " said the bill; 
it only spoke the language that they all speak, 
the invariable language of convention, which so 
many English writers have attacked, just because 
it is so artificial, because it lowers every touching 
reality, every profound and fine impulse of the 
soul to the level of the commonplace and the 
jocular. Many must have pondered long before 
going to take the oath and sign on at the recruit- 
ing office. But once the pledge is taken, you would 
think they had just entered for athletic sports, 
or booked their tickets for a somewhat lengthy 
shooting expedition in South Africa. " Having 
chosen to do their bit," says Kipling, "they do 
it without talking any more about their motives 
than they would talk about their religion or their 
love affairs. Of endurance, of self-sacrifice, of 
absolute devotion, of the sentiments and virtues 
from which this marvellous world is born and 
which keep it in being, there is never any dis- 
cussion. In the camp, all this is taken for 
granted; otherwise there would be no camp." ^ 
It is patriotism which has created the army; 
but once in the army, patriotism must no longer 
express itself. One of the drawings of Punch, in 
which the prevaiHng types and manners of the 
moment are so vividly revealed, shows a sergeant 
drilling recruits still in civil garb. In the button- 
^ An Army in Training. 



THE MEN 111 

hole of his jacket, one of the volunteers is wearing 
a little Union Jack : " Take that gew-gaw out ! 
You're a soldier now. We want no damned 
patriotism in the army ! " Their favourite songs, 
at the front, are very significant. This winter, in 
the trenches of Flanders with the water up to 
their waists, under a ceaseless grey rain, they were 
singing the ballad " Somewhere the sun is shining." 
At the beginning of the war "Tipperary" was all 
the rage. They like the " Marseillaise " for its 
" go " and because they want to show loyalty 
to the Alliance, just as the French flag is iflown 
in London. But the fire of the words they do 
not feel. As one of their fellow-countrymen, who 
has long observed them during the course of this 
war, says, it would be impossible for them to 
sing an English equivalent to Deutschland uber 
Alles : if they were to set about celebrating in 
chorus the glory of their country " they would 
think they were play-acting," and still less could 
they intone Hymns of Hate. The National 
Anthem is a prayer for the king, a hymn sung 
with bared head and all the devotion of religion. 
As to the dangers and horrors of the war itself, 
the nearer they are to the firing line, the more 
direct, persona], and terrible their experiences, 
the stricter seems to be their reticence. At the 
rear they talk pretty freely of what they see and 
hear — of the wounded, of the effects of gas and 
shells, of the reported atrocities of the " Huns " ; 
but in the firing line, they smoke their pipes, 
and content themselves with writing home ; "I 



112 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

hope this card will find you well, as it leaves 



me. 



1 



One rule of the game is respect for their opponent, 
and, in case of defeat, absence of ill-feeling. At 
the beginning, in spite of their first experience in 
Belgium, and of their frightful losses at Mons and 
Le Cateau, they tried conscientiously to practise 
it. A Highlander, in a letter quoted by John 
Buchan, relates what he has heard of the slaughters 
in Belgium, and then — scrupulous Calvinist — 
draws a distinction : "I must say that those 
before our lines do nothing of the sort. They fight 
quite clean." And then he adds the most ex- 
treme word of praise which is to be found in the 
old, puritanical, shop-keeping vocabulary : " They 
are highly respectable people." As late as last 
Christmas, these good sportsmen shook hands 
with their enemies. But things changed. They 
found out that their enemies were not " playing 
the game," therefore that they were no longer 
foes with whom, after victory or defeat, one could 
live on honourable terms, but vermin which it was 
absolutely necessary to exterminate in order that 
the world might remain habitable. Before the 
foul blows of the Germans, who " hit below the 
belt," there was nothing for it but to keep silence, 
clench your teeth, and " stick it." 

Many of them have Bibles, and the regiment 

has its chaplain. On Sundays, on the eve of a 

dangerous assault, the " Padre," in a white sur- 

pHce thrown over his khaki, holds a service. 

^ John Buchan, History of the Wcur, vol. v. p. 37, 



THE MEN 113 

They solemnly held such a service at Compiegne, 
when, after a week of exhausting retreat, they 
received the order to attack. Those grave psalms 
and prayers recited aloud in unison bring near to 
them once more the atmosphere of their village 
churches, only to be called up by those old words 
and sounds so utterly English. By the magic of this 
worship, in which all actively participate, the vague, 
deep ideas of duty and religion, of England and her 
history, are blended for them into a single emotion. 

They still have faith in their caste distinctions. 
These soldiers, especially those of the lower 
class, will have none but real gentlemen to lead 
them. After the immense slaughter of officers 
of the regular army, when it was necessary to 
provide leaders for the unforeseen and ever- 
increasing numbers of new troops, how many 
lads of eighteen and twenty (and what a boy 
an Englishman is at that age I) were appointed 
ensigns, because they were " well born " and of 
fine physique, because they had — oh, memories of 
Waterloo ! — played on the playing-fields of Eton or 
Rugby, and been captains of cricket teams ! — and 
how many have been taken by the Moloch ! 

They are not intellectual ; knowledge and ideas 
have never formed part of this nation's ideal. In 
England, as one of Stendhal's characters says, 
intellect loses twenty-five per cent, of its value, 
and an intelligent man is known only as a " clever 
man." A writer in the Fortnightly remarked the 
other day that England is the only country in 
Europe where a mother could, unconcernedly, say 



114 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

of her son : " My Charlie has never been very 
brainy." In just such a tone a candidate for 
Sandhurst told me one day : "I'm not good at 
exams, you know " — that tone would have been 
very different if it had been a question of in- 
efficiency at cricket. An honours degree man, a 
distinguished Greek scholar of Cambridge, declared 
to me : "I never read." In this country which 
has produced spontaneously, without intensive 
culture, some of the greatest scientific men, 
philosophers, novelists, and beyond all question 
the greatest poets of the world ; in this country, 
the civilisation of which is so original and so 
deeply ingrained, intellect has never been an end 
in itself : it remains an organ for the service 
of life, warns the individual of the difficulties he 
may meet, and enables him to adapt himself to 
them from day to day. These English soldiers 
are by nature just as ready to turn their hands 
to anything as ours are; and their improvised 
officers quickly learn their special duties by prac- 
tice, in the true English method. Finally, this 
army of volunteers, in which nobody wears spec- 
tacles or has any theories about his race and his 
culture, is already proving itself, man for man, 
superior to the methodically and mechanically 
trained enemy. They are just honest, handsome 
English lads, whose only aim is to behave well, 
to obey their orders, to shoot straight, to bear 
smilingly, or silently, every strain and every fatigue, 
and then, if possible, to get a bath and a square 
meal like " respectable " men. In London and in 



THE MEN 115 

the suburban camps, I watched them drilHng in 
civiHan costume, and in their shirt sleeves — 
patiently, with true " good will to the work," and 
a silent determination to make the best use of 
their training, and learn as quickly as possible 
all that was necessary to make them efficient 
professional soldiers ! The fair, strong, regular 
stamp of England was on them all; the unity 
of type plainly visible ; they embodied the 
peculiarl}^ English ideas, those which are spread 
and maintained by education and environment, 
and shape the human material from generation to 
generation. Honest, steady lads, the healthiest 
and most conscientious of their country, serious 
minded, under their simple and smiling exterior : 
truly the human flower of England. Decent 
fellows, fine physique : " will give a good account 
of themselves," said their fellow-countrymen, 
whose faith in these qualities may well be a 
dangerous delusion : the powers of matter and 
machinery are easily forgotten ; an enemy, morally 
and physically inferior, may win the day if he is 
better armed. But the English have always 
tended to regard war as a development of their 
ancestral sport, the " noble art of boxing " — a 
friendly struggle in which each opponent uses but 
his fists, and strikes but the regulation blows, so 
that the best trained, the most vigorous, the most 
patient — ^in a word, the " best man " — is sure to 
win. " Murder by machinery," they called the 
early battles, in presence of the new destructive 
devices of the enemy. But they have learnt their 



116 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

lesson now and adapted themselves to the facts. 
To-day all industrial England is manufacturing man- 
slaying machines. All industrial England : what 
this means will become more and more apparent as 
time goes on. 

One last feature of this army completes its reve- 
lation of the national soul, a soul as original as it 
is old. I no longer refer to the human material, 
but to its classification, to the peculiar structure 
evolved. One would have thought that, to classify 
these improvised legions, too numerous for any 
existing organisation, and without connection with 
the past, numbers, simplest and clearest method 
of all, freest from relics and complications of the 
past, would at once have been selected : Why not 
number them ? But such an arrangement was too 
abstract and logical for the English mind, which 
seems always to prefer the irrational processes of 
vital evolution. The past is the initial condition 
of evolution : everything living springs from the 
past, and is developed out of previous forms. At 
Lord Kitchener's call armies sprang from the void 
— a new creation. And so it was held necessary 
to instil into them the virtue belonging to old 
things which a long course of evolution has de- 
veloped; they were straightway affiliated to the 
old British regiments, each with its name, its 
badge, its mascot, its peculiar features and tra- 
ditions, its local patriotism, its personal and 
plainly recognisable soul, to the old regiments of 
England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, on whose 



THE MEN 117 

colours are inscribed the name of Ramillies and 
Waterloo : Buffs, Gordon Highlanders, Scots Greys, 
Irish Fusiliers, Grenadier Guards, King's or Queen's 
Own — or again, that Honourable Artillery Com- 
pany founded by Henry VIII, and originally 
armed with the arquebuse, whose chief pride is 
to draw all its privates from the ranks of the 
well born, and half of whose numbers — strange 
phenomenon for an artillery corps — are pure in- 
fantry. These regiments have such genuine in- 
dividuality that one of the recruiting problems 
was to satisfy those many youths who wished 
only to enlist in particular corps ; to respect these 
preferences, as an inevitable feature of the volun- 
tary and religious act of enlistment was deemed 
inevitable. In general, they managed this success- 
fully by a device which proves once more the com- 
plete indifference of the English to logical sym- 
metry; they simply multiplied the battalions of 
a regiment according to its popularity; to-day, 
like a hive that produces fresh swarms, a single 
regiment may count fifteen thousand men under 
its flag, whilst another may have but eight hun- 
dred. Add to all these queer complications all 
sorts of fanciful names, of generally ancient, 
but now and again modern origin, none giving 
any useful information to the enemy : Sherwood 
Foresters, Warwick Yeomanry, Artist Fusiliers, 
Public School Regiment, Business Men's Corps 
(in the latter instances the similarity of origin 
at once gave distinct spiritual entity to these 
new regiments), and you may imagine the initial 



118 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

contempt of the Germans, and their final com- 
plete bewilderment in the presence of a nomen- 
clature so devoid of technical and mathematical 
qualities.^ 

Such are the characteristics of this most original 
army, which, from the start, and because this is 
a need of the Enghsh mind, has succeeded in 
linking itself on to all the precedents, to all the 
ancient military traditions of the country, and 
in clothing itself with their prestige. This army 
is the purest embodiment of the national life that 
has ever sprung from the depths of England. In 
it the whole essence of the nation is plainly 
visible : its habits and mental processes, its re- 
ligion, ethics and ideals, its social code, conven- 
tions, prejudices, all its virtues and moral energies. 
Feeling as if I were witnessing something entirely 
spiritual and almost mystic, I watched in London, 
near the Guildhall or at Westminster, the incessant 
process which, for the last fifteen months, has been 
drawing and distilling from the shapeless mass of 
the English nation its veritable essence. Perched 
on his taxi, a recruiting officer would be speak- 
ing; from time to time, a man would leave the 
crowd and go to join a row of others in caps 
and bowlers — ^the recruits, the newly converted, 

^ Add to this that the same regiment includes battalions of 
Regulars, of Special Reserve (distinct, these, from the National 
Reserve), of Kitchener's Army, of the Territorials, or Volunteers, 
who are by no means the same as the newly enrolled volunteers. 
The Corps of Artist Fusiliers is a training school for officers, 
Few Englishmen can see their way through the tangle. " But 
it works ! " 



THE MEN 119 

surrounded by a squad of stiff, upright soldiers 
in khaki. The national conscience and will to 
life of the country had just been awakened in 
these men of the street ; of his own accord each 
took his place, in a new and definite order, 
for the furtherance of that one end to which 
all the forces of this country tend evermore to 
converge — victory. On one almost imperceptible 
spot, one could see growing out of the nation, 
the army, the bright steel, which was sharpen- 
ing blade and point, before one's very eyes. 
The fifes and drums would sound, and with one 
movement, short and sharp, the soldiers shouldered 
arms, and off would march the squad — the 
men in common dress surrounded by the men 
in uniform, the new recruits keeping step already 
to the strong beat of the old English military 
tune. 

Such a movement, whose extent and duration 
have already exceeded all anticipations, must reach 
its limit at last. One million, two million, and 
yesterday we were told three million, volunteers 
have offered themselves — more than half the num- 
ber that compulsory service could have given, and 
never has England done anything that so clearly 
revealed her inner virtue. But the conscience of 
a people is like its other characteristics, which are 
expressions of an average, or more exactly of a 
dominant note, marking only the frequent presence 
of certain types or qualities. Though in these 
millions of young men the English conscience has 
spoken, in many others of the same class it remains 



120 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

dumb or helpless ^ ; in hundreds of thousands, per- 
haps, it will never speak. The more the numbers 
of the conscientious approach exhaustion, the more 
clearly the unconscientious stand out, and they are 
apparently not to be converted. Thus the flaw of 
the system appears in a new and startling light. 
The system, a natural one, because of its historic 
and not theoretic origin, is based on the old Eng- 
lish principle : " liberty of the subject." Between 
this liberty and the growing vital necessity of 
organising and utilising for the war all the human 
energies of the country, the opposition becomes 
every day more plainly manifest. And here is a 
second still more startling contradiction : such 
liberty — in this case the liberty of the cowardly 
and the selfish to refuse themselves, whilst the 
best are dying for England, and, incidentally, for 
them — is evidently inconsistent with the dictates 
of that other principle, "justice," which has a no 
less powerful hold on the English mind, and is, 
moreover, to-day supported by all the new social- 
istic ideas which, in this democracy, as in ours, 
aim much less at the freedom of the individual 
than at the equality of all. For one or the other 
of these two principles the British grouped them- 
selves into two camps, according as they desired 
conscription or not, and this conflict, impassioned 
as are all those in which rival principles attack 
each other, tends more and more to take the place 

^ It was calculated by the recruiting authorities, at the 
beginning of November 1915, that 1,250,000 men of military 
age had not offered themselves. This number did not include 
the railway servants, or those engaged on munitions of war 
Morning Post, November 4, 1915). 



THE MEN 121 

of the old party divisions. One fact may seem 
strange : The Conservatives, champions hitherto of 
individual liberty, now crowd into the camp where 
the modern idea of justice is worshipped; whilst 
the SociaHsts, democratic apostles of equality, pass 
over into that where the old EngHsh idea of liberty 
is still upheld. Once again logic fails, but this 
time the reasons for the failure are not specially 
English : they are merely human. 

October 1915.^ 

^ See Appendix B. 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 



One of the chief German fallacies, repeated 
in every war pamphlet in order to justify the 
Germanic lust for conquest, is that the right of 
a people to its territory is measured by its force 
of life and its will to life — Lebenskraft, Lebenswille 
— of which the true criterion is its military power. 
When this power is lacking, an empire is but an 
empty shell, a shape once developed by life, but 
from which life has departed, and which will 
crumble into dust as soon as it is touched with 
the sword. Thus, " war is the great test of the 
nations " ; "it reveals the lie and enthrones truth 
in its place." ^ 

^ Das Sittliche Becht des Krieges, in Internationale Monatschrift, 
October 1914, by R. Seeberg, Professor of Theology, University 
of Berlin. See my articles on " Germany and the War,^* Revue 
de Paris, March 15, April 15 and May 15, 1915, and especially 
the first, in which these theories are examined. It is because 
the German attributes a moral and mystic sense to might, be- 
cause he regards it as the external sign of nobility and right, 
that all the English proposals for disarmament were received 
with sarcastic anger as impertinences. Germany was invited 
to reduce herself to the condition of those states which Treitschke 
calls emasculated {verstilmmelt), because devoid of strength. 
With regard to the unexpected anger stirred up by the ingenuous 
advances of England, see Mr. Austin Harrison's book, England 
and Germany (Chap. Ill), published in 1907, on the morrow 
of the Algeciras Conference, and foreshadowing the whole 
situation. 

122 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 128 

The sophistry in this thesis — a variant, or a 
corollary, of the theory which asserts that might 
is right — becomes manifest when the Germans 
apply it to England, that old country whose breed 
of men has remained so young. They might 
just as well apply it to that other country, whose 
growth has far outstripped every known precedent 
and is still going on — ^the United States. In 
England, as in America, if the military organisa- 
tion is weak, it is not because there is any lack of 
vitality — vitality overflows in an infinite range of 
activities — it is simply that these nations have 
not developed on military lines. The German 
thesis is that which any carnivorous animal might 
maintain against any peaceful creature, perhaps 
of nobler and sometimes of richer life than its 
own, but which it can make its prey, because the 
latter, long used and adapted to conditions of 
safety, lacks defensive organs, or at least those 
special organs necessary for the conflict forced 
upon it. The fangs of the wolf are no sign of 
superior vitality, and the Wolf of the tale did not 
talk of the moral virtue and mystic meaning of 
his fangs. 

Against the military machine which Germany 
had so carefully constructed, and which was 
meant to conquer all the coast facing Folkestone, 
Dover and the Thames, England was, at the be- 
ginning of the war, almost defenceless. Through 
vital and long-standing necessity, in order to 
secure the sea routes by which her food is brought, 
she created of old, and has supported and per- 
fected with traditional persistency, her naval 



124 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

instrument of war. For a conflict on land, against 
a great continental power, she had prepared 
nothing efficient. When war broke out she could 
theoretically mobilise 400,000 men, including the 
Special Reserve and the Territorials, a sort of 
voluntary militia, more or less trained by short 
periods of drill, but w^hich had never seen actual 
service. In fact, she could dispose at most of 
250,000 soldiers. 1 And we must not forget that, 
to help France in case of aggression — if she did 
help her, for she had pledged herself to nothing — 
she had never spoken of throwing more than 
160,000 men into Belgium. It was with approxi- 
mately these numbers that she attempted to face 
the German avalanche, comforting herself — since 
it was necessary now not merely to give effect to 
promises, but to throw back the enemy — with the 
thought that, by summoning her men to do their 
duty, by reminding Britons of Nelson's words, 
she could, in a few months, improvise an army 
which would really be able to face that of Ger- 
many. She has always waited until the crisis is 
upon her, before attempting to adjust herself 
to it. 

She was not mistaken in her men ; we have seen 
how they answered to the appeal. The enthusiasm 
was such that in the autumn of 1914 they were 

1 It must be noted that, of the regular army, one-half (125,000 
men) were in the colonies at the beginning of the war. Mr. 
Oliver {Ordeal hy Battle) shows that about 50,000 others were 
not available for service. The Territorials, who enlist for four 
years, only have a few days* drill a year, and are not bound to 
serve outside England. 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 125 

pointing to the date (April) when a milHon new 
trained soldiers would be fighting on the French 
and Flemish fronts. 

In April the new soldiers in England greatly 
exceeded this number, but they were far from 
reaching it on the Continent. The reason was, 
that to fight Germany with any chance of suc- 
cess, something more was needed than the good- 
will of those who, by the mere act of taking a 
pledge, so promptly provided their country with 
armies. It was necessary that the country should 
organise itself internally for war, and for this 
purpose, change its methods of work and life, its 
habits and its very spirit; it was necessary that 
England, following the example of her enemy, 
should, as was said later on, completely trans- 
form herself into a machine, with all her forces 
systematically co-ordinated, directed and con- 
trolled by a central power, and applied all 
together to the set purpose. And one fine day 
it was perceived that, under the strain of this 
unforeseen and stupendous effort, that old engine, 
the War Office, whose antiquated administrative 
mechanism had been strong enough for an army 
of 250,000 regulars, had completely broken down. 
The very success of Lord Kitchener in calling into 
being new legions brought in its train the bank- 
ruptcy of the bureaucracy. The Government had 
felt this bankruptcy coming, had tried several 
times to stave it off. Towards the middle of 
May 1915 it could no longer be prevented; it 
was openly revealed, producing on the public 
the impression of a ** scandal " — for that was 



126 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

how our Allies stigmatised their munition crisis. 
At once, but after a delay already of ten months 
— and that was England's great mistake; but 
after all, what belligerent foresaw exactly what 
this war would be ? — England began the vast 
and deep process of adaptation which was to 
change her, in the very midst of the struggle, 
into a military power of the same order as those 
of the Continent. The machine which France and 
Germany had built in forty or fifty years (much 
more in the case of Prussia), which the enemy 
had kept so perfectly regulated, so well oiled, that 
he had only to touch a button in order to set it 
going and obtain instantly its maximum power, 
England was obliged, during the course of the 
war, to set up from the very foundation, collect- 
ing all the materials and putting them together 
bit by bit. Besides, she was destitute of that 
central and supreme authority, whose despotic 
foresight might have shortened such an under- 
taking. For each novel operation of the State 
she had to canvass and consult a myriad-headed, 
constantly shifting public opinion. This is always 
a slow and difficult business, and more so, when 
the enterprise runs counter to the most inveterate 
ideas and habits, to the very root principle of the 
nation. The problem was, for the most unsystem- 
atic people in the world, to accommodate them- 
selves to a system ; for the people who worshipped 
liberty, to submit to servitude; for the nation 
which was, and always had been, the least mili- 
tary, to accept the yoke of militarism. This great 
effort at adaptation will be better understood 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 127 

if we look first at the anxieties and sudden mis- 
givings from which it sprang in the tenth month 
of the war. 



II 

I myself watched the Munitions Affair pretty 
closely, not in its administrative and technical 
details, but in its general effect on the public, 
which was to awaken England to the idea of her 
shortcomings, and to show her the whole of her 
problem, stirring up at the same time the desire 
to solve it. It had scarcely begun when I arrived 
in London on May 20, but I felt a crisis in the air 
at once. 

People looked gloomy, and it struck me as a 
good sign. The feeling of danger is necessary to 
stimulate Old England to shake off age-long habits 
and prejudices, to force her really to think, and 
brace herself for real effort. But it is by no means 
easy to upset her feeling of security. That is w^hy, 
with the English, for many years, and most of all 
to-day, patriotism and pessimism have become 
identified. To sound the alarm bell had been the 
incessant endeavour of the great newspapers which 
favoured conscription : The Times, The Daily 
Mail, The Morning Post and The Standard, from 
that day in July 1914 when the thunder-cloud 
rose so quickly and cast its sinister shadow over 
Europe. From time to time during all the first 
year of the war they kept on counting up the forces, 
the successes, the formidable dangers threatened 



128 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

by the enemy, or they published letters from neu- 
trals of such a nature that, in any other country, 
their correspondents would have been suspected 
of being paid by Germany; in fact Sven Hedin 
himself did not extol so highly the resources, the 
self-confidence, the method and organisation of 
Germany.^ 

Not that any one ever doubted of success. In 
the month of May, just as to-day, the only anxiety 
was as to the length of the struggle and the price 
it would be necessary to pay for victory. A com- 
munication to The Times (May 14) had just 
revealed the shortage of shells, and its conse- 
quence to the troops, who were cut down in 
their attacks for lack of sufficient artillery pre- 
paration. All that the officers could do was to 
hold their ground heroically with their men, under 
hurricanes of shells. The War Office had given 
wrong orders, manufacturing shrapnel when high 
explosive was required ! It had failed to avail 
itself of the industrial resources of the country : 
factories, the plant of which could be used for 
the production of shells, had not been set to 
work : in the State arsenals not even all the 
normal staff was employed; the officials had re- 
fused the proffered help of English iron-masters ! 
Such were the revelations which, starting with 

1 At the end of November 1916, Sir John Simon complained 
in Parliament of this systematic pessimism and demonstrated 
what advantage the German Government had obtained in 
Germany, Bulgaria, Greece and Roumania from certain over* 
gloomy articles of The Times and Daily Mail. See especially 
the articles in The Times (July 1916), on the superiority of 
German organisation. The object, of course, was to stir up 
England to effort by the contrast. 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 129 

that telegram to The Times, all the Conservative 
papers were beginning to publish; the others, 
fearing high-handed measures on the part of the 
Government, endeavoured to reassure the public. 
But the daily lists of dead and wounded were 
growing terribly long, and thereon even the 
most simple-minded began to ponder. Those who 
were in mourning thought of sons, brothers, hus- 
bands whom they would never see again, who, 
perhaps would still have been alive if there had 
been enough guns and shells. Thus arose a great 
wave of public opinion, paving the way for the 
reform which no English Prime Minister could 
have introduced if he had not felt the country 
behind him. It would be necessary probably to 
subject certain industries to State control : that 
is to say, to meddle with habits not only very 
old, but hallowed with the prestige which all old 
things enjoy in England. And, much more than 
this, it would be necessary to tamper with that 
which should never be touched, the sacrosanct 
** liberty of the subject." For that which dif- 
ferentiates the Englishman from men of all other 
nations is his personal freedom at every moment 
and in all the acts of life. He will be no longer 
free if he loses the right to strike, if he is sub- 
jected to restraints of a foreign, " continental " 
type, which — according to a vague, dumb senti- 
ment very deep-rooted in the British people — con- 
stitute the inferiority of " Continentals " ; — in fine, 
if it is no longer of his own free will that he 
shoulders a gun, or works in a factory. Hence 
the slowness with which — and this in the very 



130 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

presence of the enemy — the country organised 
herself for the fight; an organisation which de- 
pended, not on the decision of the Government, 
but on the slow and spontaneous harmonising 
of private opinions and wills. Hence the neces- 
sity of press campaigns, and propaganda of all 
sorts, in order to mass and direct opinion, till 
the moment came for those compulsory measures 
which the best-informed had at once demanded; 
and whose urgency some, indeed, had not waited 
for the war to proclaim. 

In fact, as in all the great crises of her history, 
England was learning from actual experience. 
There was much groping and inadequacy at first, 
as always in this country of empiricism and tra- 
dition; then, after partial failures, and a long 
series of surprises and fresh starts, she gradually 
adjusted herself to difiiculties which she never 
foresaw, just as they came along. This is per- 
haps the method of life itself — progressive, in- 
stinctive, and productive, if given time, of fruitful 
and lasting organic developments ; it is, at all 
events, the characteristic method of England, as 
revealed in the constitution and all the institu- 
tions of this country, and the very opposite of 
that German method, which, first setting up sheer 
theory, and co-ordinating the means for a pre- 
determined end, rapidly produces mechanical con- 
structions — of which Germany herself is one. But 
the mechanical may kill the organic before the 
latter has completed its defensive transforma- 
tions, for spontaneous adaptation is always slow, 
especially when the living creature, having reached 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 131 

a certain age, is subject to the influences of a 
long past and firmly wedded to its acquired shape 
and tendencies. Slow and fragmentary, for the 
vital effort at adjustment does not act synchro- 
nously on all the organs. England, for instance, 
which at the beginning of hostilities did not count 
three hundred thousand soldiers, had set on foot 
an army of more than two million men. It was 
a miracle without a precedent in history; un- 
fortunately, the development of material resources 
for the equipment of this army did not keep pace 
with its numbers. Very often in life, organs 
which are complementary to each other as parts 
of the same system — or even the complementary 
parts of the same organ — are the result of a dis- 
tinct evolution from differing elements. And, in- 
deed, the question of equipment was of a quite 
different nature, and much more complex, than 
the question of men. The increase in the num- 
bers of the latter depended only on the progress 
of opinion. Nothing more was required than to 
stir it up : more and more men understood Eng- 
land's need and enlistments grew apace. But the 
ammunition problem was chiefly industrial, and 
raised at once all kinds of technical, social and 
even political difficulties, which the State alone, 
whose authority in England is so limited, could, by 
a sudden and quite novel assumption of directing 
and organising powers, attempt to solve. It would 
have to interfere, in many trades, between capital 
and labour, not as an optional arbitrator, but 
as a despot; it would have, in order to win the 
good-will of the workmen, to limit the profits of 



132 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

shareholders and masters; it would have to 
meddle with the rights of the trade unions, rights 
consecrated by seventy-five years of legislation 
and judicial administration. It would have, per- 
haps, and that without any sanction from pre- 
cedent, to impose on whole populations, such as 
the miners of Wales, the restraints of labour under 
military conditions — in other words, to limit the 
liberties which Englishmen, for more than three 
centuries, have proudly regarded as their inherit- 
ance and special privilege amongst the nations. 
The State could never dare to undertake, England 
would never accept, such measures except under 
the scourge of necessity. That scourge had not 
yet been sufficiently felt, and, on the whole, 
things had been allowed to drift, government 
and country relying on the mere strength of the 
English will — to see this thing through — ^to hold out, 
to hew a path, without any extravagant expendi- 
ture of thought, through all future difficulties, 
with the help, of course, of Providence, but chiefly 
of the national genius for retrieving initial mis- 
takes, and concluding every war, in accordance 
with the demands of morality, by the triumph of 
the better. 

There are two very significant phrases that 
the English often use in their moments of self- 
criticism — ^they have many such moments. The 
one is "the happy-go-lucky system," the begin- 
ning anyhow, as nature does in her operations, 
which always seem so accidental; a system of 
relying on the knack which things have of dis- 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 133 

entangling themselves, especially if, as is usual 
in England, a patient will, which never planned 
anything beforehand, drives them persistently, 
day by day, towards the desired end. Notice 
that this is really a system, and one which, 
after all, has always succeeded — founded on faith 
in the processes and spontaneous operations of 
life and instinct, in opposition to the activities 
and results of rational thought. Macaulay ex- 
pounded the theory of this English system ; Dilke 
once gave me this definition of it : " absence 
of system " ; and Kipling has defined the main 
principle of English moral and social discipline 
as : " understanding that you are not to under- 
stand." Was it a mere irony when, in a recent 
fictitious dialogue. Sir Thomas Barclay put these 
words into the mouth of a German professor — 
" the English have a great advantage over us : 
evolution is more natural and easy when there 
is no cerebral activity to introduce any compli- 
cations into it " ? A great many English people 
share in all seriousness the views of that pro- 
fessor. For, make no mistake, it is not here a 
question of any incapacity, but of a definitely 
adopted social method. Purely and simply, great 
intellectual activity is not very much admired 
in England. It is a remarkable feature of this 
country to value many things more highly than 
mere intelligence and learning; this is well illus- 
trated by the typical schools of the gentry whose 
open-air games, compulsory and educative, form 
the chief part of the curriculum. Two necessary 
consequences follow. First — ^not perhaps amongst 



134 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

the working masses, but amongst those who have 
received the plastic influences of the genuine 
and properly English culture — ^there is a greater 
development of physical perfection, a greater 
strength of nerve : freshness of mind and youth 
of body are preserved longer, one may perhaps 
even say (see the obituaries of The Times and 
Morning Post) that longevity is more frequent. 
This, surely, is something. On the other hand, 
there is nothing in England to compare with the 
great intellectual public of Paris which, without 
rising above a certain level — since it is not com- 
posed, after all, either of creative artists or of 
original thinkers, and is indeed but an average 
— can nevertheless talk on every subject, judge, 
discuss and criticise every production of art and 
thought; and, precisely because its opinion is so 
influential, is inclined to deny the existence of 
such as do not suit its particular tastes and habits, 
and to oppose what goes beyond its own standards 
and criteria. Yet — and here is the paradox for 
those who would like to sacrifice everything to 
knowledge and mental culture — this England, 
which is so unintellectual, has never ceased to 
produce her full share of thinkers and inventors, 
of geniuses and men of talent, and has remained 
as constantly as our country in the first rank of 
civilisation. Still, when a determined attack 
suddenly demands new expedients, the forces of 
habit and recourse to precedents are not suflicient : 
you may be taken too unawares. 

Not less significant is that other phrase, ironic- 
ally invented by Lord Rosebery during the Boer 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 135 

War : to muddle through. Muddling through — 
that is, through confusion after confusion, mis- 
take on mistake, failure on failure, to succeed, 
nevertheless, in getting out of your scrape. Such 
a method is expensive and requires plenty of time. 
It is true that in England, perhaps because it is 
the country of tradition, time counts for much 
less than elsewhere. Conrad, the Anglo-Polish 
novelist, has symbolised this method, together 
with the whole national psychology, in the story 
of that admirable and taciturn sailor who, con- 
fronted with an enormous and sudden fall of the 
barometer, refused to open the navigation hand- 
book in which he would have found the theory of 
cyclones, because, like an Englishman of the old 
stock, he despised principles and theories, and 
with the imperturbability of an ox, went right 
through the centre of an appalling typhoon, saving 
his ship, nevertheless, by dint of dumb and dogged 
courage, indefatigable patience and careful atten- 
tion to each monstrous towering wave as it arose 
— perhaps, too, by dint of miraculous good luck, 
though surely such valorous determination alone 
ought to compel success, whatever the lack of 
thought. Well muddle through ! was the cry but 
yesterday, just as sixteen years ago in the face 
of all the unforeseen difficulties of the South 
African War. But in May 1915 the remark 
was often added : " Yes, but what a muddle ! " 
Anxiety was visible. The appeal to the stoical 
and well -trained will, to ''character,'' the old 
English injunction, " If at first you don't succeed, 
try again," were no longer sufficient. Or, rather. 



136 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

it was no longer a question of " trying again," 
but of changing one's methods, and perhaps one- 
self, of giving up those tendencies and qualities 
of the collective English mind which are so par- 
ticularly insular, those ways of thinking and doing 
crystallised by time into hereditary habits, into 
automatic systems of action : almost, one might 
say, the English character, — and that in order 
to remodel oneself on the continental plan. A 
hard thing, this, for a people that worships its 
traditions, to which long ages have given such 
persistency. Just like the first unpleasant sur- 
prise of the Boer War (lucky war which compelled 
England to a first attempt at adaptation !), the 
munitions scandal set the country questions which 
by instinct it had avoided as long as possible — 
questions of fundamental principles. 

And first it set them a question, most pressing 
of all, speedily to be solved. Given a govern- 
ment born of traditional party conflicts, essentially 
averse to making war, constituted to carry out 
a certain programme of domestic reforms, which 
had occupied the whole attention of Parhament 
and the electorate — given a popular, democratic 
government, resting on the opinion of an ill- 
informed majority, and which dares, as it has 
clearly shown, neither to thwart that majority 
nor to enlighten it — is such a government com- 
petent to wage a deadly war against the trained 
staff of specialists, all powerful in prestige and 
authority, which directs everything on the Ger- 
man side? And more generally speaking, in a 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 137 

question of life and death, when quick adapta- 
tion, efficient discipKne and system had become, 
all of a sudden, urgent necessities, what was 
to be thought of the old English method which 
left everything to be decided by the free, gradual 
and mutual adjustment of private activities ? 
Could the old commercial and liberal principle 
of laisser-faire, of " live and let live," which 
made the greatness and beauty of England in the 
peaceful reign of Victoria, still be valid, under 
the threat and the blows of such a war? Was 
it still the moment for persuasion and discussion, 
or had the time at last come for command and 
obedience ? 

The moment you set foot in England to-day, 
you feel these questions in the air. Travelling 
up from Folkestone, before even I had heard 
these doubts expressed, their disquieting presence 
vaguely affected my mind. I was turning over 
the leaves of an English book, garnished with 
photographs of the Kaiser's friends and advisers. 
By the side of the War Lord were the soldier 
kings and princes of Bavaria, Wurtemberg and 
Saxony, the Crown Prince, the Admiral Prince 
Henry of Prussia, who paid England a visit of 
such careful scrutiny just before the attack; and 
underneath : Von Moltke, Von der Goltz, Von 
Tirpitz, Von Koster, Von Bethmann-Hollweg, 
Count Zeppelin, Bernhardi, Prince Furstemberg, 
Prince and General von Biilow, Krupp, Von 
Bohlen, Ballin, Hamman, Dernburg, Delbriick, 
Rohrbach, Rathenau, Thyssen, Von Gwinner, 
generals, admirals, statesmen, heads of naval or 



138 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

pan-German leagues, great financiers, great ship- 
owners, engineers, captains of industry, hard- 
headed reaHsts, all moved by the same fanatical 
ideal of race and fatherland, or the same greed 
for profits and conquests, all having lived for 
years in the thought of war, most of them initiated 
into the secrets of the great scheme, and eager 
for its success, most of them used to command 
and organisation, to managing men and affairs : 
a staff of technical experts, each one of whom 
had specialised in some particular part of the 
formidable machine which a single touch has set 
in motion. 

Then, looking in a magazine at a picture of a 
great sitting of the Commons, I recognised the 
agreeable and familiar faces of the British states- 
men and parliamentary leaders : Mr. Asquith, an 
honest and sagacious barrister, perhaps, as such, 
and as a party leader, more inclined to think of 
the words and arguments which win verdicts and 
divisions than of the facts, which have no voice, 
yet in politics, never fail to develop their conse- 
quences — Mr. Asquith whose wary attitude of 
" Wait and see " was so suddenly upset by a 
terrible necessity for action; Mr. Lloyd George, 
once a solicitor, in whom the flame of idealism 
burns through sparks of Celtic wit and fancy, 
a great administrator, a great tribune of the 
people, whose eloquence has since done so much 
to bring over the trade unions to the idea of the 
disciplined, national effort — and yet with what fire 
he indicted and ridiculed, in 1910, the " scare- 
mongers," the dismal prophets of the German 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 139 

war (I can still hear the laughter and applause 
of the working men at Peckham) ! Lord Hal- 
dane, the student and thinker, the " speciaKst in 
German affairs," who was proclaiming before the 
war his " personal debt " to Germany, and talked 
of the advocates of conscription as " political 
amateurs : " and, indeed, Lord Roberts was a 
specialist only of military necessities, and a mere 
amateur in the politics of committee room and 
lobby ; Mr. Churchill, once a journalist, the enfant 
terrible and the enfant gate of his party, the 
man of brilliant inspirations, reproached with 
putting too much faith in the intuitions of his 
own genius, and relying more on them in his 
management of the navy than on the advice of 
sailors; Sir Edward Grey, so modest, so scrupu- 
lous, so refined, the incarnate type of the gentleman, 
who tried to set an example of good-will to the 
Germans by signing the Declaration of London, in- 
vented by them to limit the rights and powers of 
the EngKsh navy; Mr. Balfour, the philosopher; 
Mr. Birrell, the critic; Lord Crewe, Lord Curzon, 
Lord Lansdowne, and the others— all of them 
debaters, writers, well used to the traditional 
parliamentary cricket, accustomed to solve every 
difficulty by long formal debates and the divi- 
sion bell; all of them conscientious, thoughtful, 
well-bred men, so courteous in their bearing, so 
moderate in their behaviour, the finished product of 
an ancient and deeply moral and Christian culture 
which forbids above everything violence and the 
sudden yielding to instinct and passion — all of them 
innocent of any desire for, or experience of, war. 



140 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

Between the two teams — what a contrast I 
How clear it was to me, looking at the but too 
civilised British, that their very virtues, their 
humanity, their breeding, their faith in con- 
science, their candidness, must have left them 
disarmed before the professional brigands, who 
had so well prepared their masks, their pistols 
and their ambush ! ^ 

On visiting a few friends, authors, professors, 
magazine editors — chiefly Liberals — these first im- 
pressions gained in strength. At the challenge 
hurled at everything they respected, at the cyni- 
cism, the enormity of the scheme, and the frenzied 
resolution with which it was being carried out, 
they remained silent, abashed and horror-stricken. 
Between the idea which these honourable men 
had formed of progress and human dignity, and 
such manifestations of human nature, the contrast 
was shocking. An Englishman has compared 
these refined idealists to gentle, pastoral creatures 
suddenly confronted by the tiger in whom they 
had refused to believe. Before such a formidable 
and abrupt enemy theirs was the attitude of pure 
innocence, of helpless incompetence. 

But certain herbivora, when the surprise is over, 
know how to form a herd which will end by tram- 
pling the monster to death. Such was the resolu- 

1 To play the game more scrupulously by observing the Declara- 
tion of London, though it had not been ratified by Parliament, 
they abstained for several months from declaring cotton and 
corn contraband of war, and, still more curiously, the navy 
received orders to let pass the German reservists whom Germany 
was summoning home. Germans were allowed full liberty of 
movement in England. 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 141 

tion which I felt brooding beneath this silence. I 
heard it for the first time expressed with some 
ingenuousness ; it had been resolved, I was told — 
Mr. Asquith had stated it in the House of Com- 
mons — to prosecute, after the war, the responsible 
authors of the worst atrocities. Yes, William II 
and Von Tirpitz would become acquainted with 
" hard labour " or the gallows. If any one hinted 
at the shortcomings of England, at the immensity 
of the problems to be solved, at the incredible 
strength and existing advantages of the enemy, 
he was heard in silence. But sometimes a short 
sentence, uttered quite simply, and almost in an 
undertone, expressed the essential fact : Well never 
give in. And I felt at once, what indeed I already 
knew, that the idea of giving in, of not fighting 
to a finish, let the war last one year or ten, 
would never enter these minds — ^that this was 
simply psychologically impossible. History has 
demonstrated that such a resolution is the force 
that the enemy must consider before almost any 
other ; for nothing will Y/ear it out, and in the long 
run it has always overcome everything — which 
does not mean that in our mechanical age it will 
always be sufficient. Beneath the perfect good 
form and restraint of modem, civilised English- 
men, the primitive trait of the race subsists, the 
determination not to yield, to go on fighting, 
though beaten. It reappears whenever a closely 
pressed attack, or a success of the enemy, casts 
doubt upon the conviction, which this people still 
retains, despite everything, of its own superiority : 
a secret, an almost unconscious conviction, because 



142 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

it lies so deep : a dumb conviction, because it has 
reached that degree of strength and habit which 
does not call for expression. 

This same steadfast will, when governed by 
conscience, is what they call character. And char- 
acter means everything to the English; all their 
education tends to its development, to teaching it 
as the supreme English virtue, the source of Eng- 
lish strength, the guarantee of English success. 
On its magic power they relied more than on any- 
thing else, at the beginning of the war, to force 
a way to victory. Only in May 1915 was the 
discovery being made that the way to victory 
lay through discipline and organisation. 

Meanwhile, on our side of the Channel, six months 
ago, England seemed a bit slow in getting under 
way. Under the terrific strain, with the life 
blood of France flowing fast away, people did 
not try to understand : they knew but their need 
of help and their impatience. The same feeling 
had sent me across the Channel. I wanted to 
know; and for a few days, amongst old friends, 
I ventured to put, more or less bluntly, certain 
haunting questions, which have now ceased to 
puzzle us, since we know the answers. Why did 
our Allies only hold such a short sector of our 
front? Had we not been led to hope that by 
April a million soldiers in khaki would be standing 
side by side with ours ? Soldiers were to be seen 
everywhere in the neighbourhood of London — 
everywhere, I was told, throughout England : in 
the towns, and in hundreds of new camps. One 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 143 

heard of fifteen hundred thousand men, half of 
them fully trained, who had not yet crossed the 
Channel. "V\Tiat were they waiting for? Did the 
British understand that France was fighting day 
and night along a line of six hundred kilometres — 
in Alsace, in Argonne, in Champagne, in Artois, 
in Flanders — and that battles greater than that 
of Leipzig were taking place ? Had they no idea 
of the rate at which the substance of France was 
wasting away ? Probably, by an inevitable optical 
illusion, the English saw but the English front. 
They saw it as I saw it one day at a club where 
I was consulting the two maps of the western front 
posted up in the hall : one on a very large scale 
showed the British lines ; the other, only half the 
size, represented from La Bassee to Mulhouse, a 
country seven times as extensive. A rather naive 
way of looking at things — but very natural; for 
the big scale map showed our friends the places 
where their sons have died or are still fighting : 
Mons, where five hundred of their officers fell; 
Neuve Chapelle, where they lost six hundred and 
fifty — ^the flower of the gentry and the aristo- 
cracy laid low. For if England has made mis- 
takes — and which of the belligerents has not ? — 
let us never forget that she has paid for them, 
and that the main mistake, from which all the 
others have sprung, was not to have prepared for 
war. Let us remember, to her great honour, that 
when that war broke out on the Continent, she 
plunged into it from a sheer sense of duty, against 
all German expectations, when for a struggle on 
land she was almost destitute of strength. I 



144 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

quickly ceased to ask these questions : they did 
not offend, they simply gave pain : the admira- 
tion and respect for the France which the war 
has revealed are so great ! No reply was given 
me; only some whispered words of surprise and 
regret. To listen with scrupulous attention to 
what prejudice or pride would angrily repel, in 
deference to justice and truth, is one of the fine 
features of a " gentleman's " creed. I was allowed 
only too easily to have my point. 

Besides, the more I read, the less it seemed 
to me that we were justified in putting such 
questions; they began to appear idle. For, first, 
on English soil, I was learning to understand 
better the hard, silent, but probably decisive, 
part played by the English Navy. After all, the 
Allies owe to it all the trump cards (supremacy 
of the sea, conquest of the German colonies) which 
they could play against the " tricks " taken by 
Germany, if negotiations had to be opened to- 
day. Then, too, where training schools, arsenals 
and powder factories existed for an army of only 
two hundred and fifty thousand men — an army 
which has never rehearsed war on the great scale 
as those of the Continent do every year — how 
could it be possible in six or eight months to 
train, to officer, to equip, to arm, to transport 
and to manoeuvre efficiently, two millions of 
volunteers called together by an unparalleled out- 
burst of enthusiasm? And more, is it possible to 
do this in the first year of a war in which the expen- 
diture in munitions and officers has, from the out- 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 145 

set, surpassed ten and a hundred times everything 
foreseen, with manufacturers overloaded from the 
beginning with Serbian, Russian, and French orders, 
and whose most efficient workmen have left the 
factory for the flag by tens of thousands ? And, 
speaking more generally, was it humanly possible to 
change, in less than a year, the trend of a country 
like England, the most immovable of all, the most 
obstinately attached to her traditions, the strongest 
in her resistance to foreign suggestions, and to 
improvise those authoritative powers of control 
which, in Germany and France, the State has so 
long possessed ? It may be said that, with a little 
foresight and in the light of French experience, the 
necessary evolution could have been accelerated, 
that signs of the coming catastrophe had not been 
lacking for the last ten years — ^that Lord Haldane 
in 1912 had a sudden presentiment of it ; for it was 
with unsealed eyes that he came back from Berlin, 
and we know now that he warned his colleagues : 
has he not even added that, in an indirect way, 
in a fashion familiar to readers of Browning, by 
means of cautious hints, which should have been 
sufficient, he thought he had made the great 
public understand ? ^ Of course, all could not 
have been remedied : what we have seen during 
the war is enough to show that in time of peace 
the great bulk of the nation, and, especially the 
workmen, could not have been prevailed upon to 
sacrifice their principles and their liberty. But, 
without attempting to establish conscription, would 
^ Speech at Leeds, February 17th, 1912. 



146 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

it not have been possible to speed up work in the 
Government arsenals, instead of allowing it to fall 
almost to nothing, to employ more mechanics in- 
stead of reducing their numbers, to prepare officers 
for the army which it would be necessary to create 
one day : finally, to attract more students to the 
military schools ? 

Only, such questions do not apply to England 
our ally, but to that earlier England of the last 
ten years ; to governments too dependent on 
public opinion not to follow instead of leading 
it ; to politicians too busy with popular reforms — 
their sole reason for existence — to recognise more 
pressing necessities ; to a democracy too wrapped 
up in its dreams, passions and party strifes to look 
abroad and see the coming of its aggressor. And 
moreover, it is not to England alone that such 
questions apply. In the struggle for life of the 
nations, the reign of public opinion, the catch- 
words which lead the crowd — clap-trap, as the 
English say — and ballot papers lose their virtue 
in presence of an enemy drilled by strong leaders 
— leaders who are greedy for plunder, scientific- 
ally trained and informed, carefully attentive to 
the strong and weak points of their intended 
prey, to every fact that may serve or thwart their 
scheme and to nothing but facts. This old weak- 
ness of all democracies was well known in ancient 
Athens. Better, however, the weakness and the 
danger, with liberty, than strength, if in order to 
be strong we must force ourselves — souls and 
bodies — ^into a machine, to live and die there ! 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 147 

And then, if you insist on criticising the in- 
adequacies of the past, will not a pacific demo- 
cracy retort — and this is Lord Haldane's argument 
— ^that by arming efficiently for resistance, far from 
discouraging attack, you would have hastened it. 
When a desperate robber holds you covered by 
his revolver, your first movement for defence is 
called a provocation. 



Ill 

On the whole, the more we study the general 
conditions of the problem which the war set before 
England, the more we look into the circumstances, 
the better we see that everything was bound to 
happen, as is always the case in questions which 
do not concern individuals but a nation — ^that is 
to say, large numbers and mean numbers. Of all 
the conditions, the most general, and to which 
we have ever to recur, is that England, by tradition, 
is the country of individualism and liberty, a 
country which has not been invaded since the 
Conquest and in which the State has not been 
given powers to compel the individual.^ 

^ There is, no doubt, the Defence of the Realm Act, which allows 
a censorship (very lax to French eyes) of the Press. No attempt 
has yet (November 1915) been made to apply this law against 
the interests and habits of the working class. After the muni- 
tions scandal it was necessary to pass a new Act which curtailed 
some of the rights of labour. As will be seen, this law could 
not be enforced. 



148 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

These powers it can receive only from the 
majority. Now in a nation of forty-five milHons, 
most of whom are quite incapable of imagining 
suddenly what they have never seen, direct per- 
ception, or the gradually suggested sense of neces- 
sity, can alone bring the mass to accept a form 
of control contrary to its traditions, prejudices 
and class interests, as well as to the moral and 
religious ideas which it conceives to be the truth. 
This mass, already hostile to measures which it 
damned by the one word " militarism," included 
at the beginning of the war all the working classes, 
all the dissenting bodies — on the whole the bulk 
of the Radical party. To the workmen especially, 
the conscription of labour, like military conscrip- 
tion, seemed a device of the old governing caste, 
trying to recover its long-lost power, a plot of 
the rich and the Tories, against the slowly won 
and jealously guarded rights and privileges of their 
trade unions — which are to them, when dealing 
with the masters and capitalists, precisely what 
the free cities with their charters were to the 
burgesses of the Middle Ages in their relations 
with the feudal lords. One effect of the munitions 
crisis was to relax their resistance. Not that the 
greater number of the workmen gave up, immedi- 
ately or ioT long, their special class point of view ; 
but, under the pressure of the published facts, of such 
tragic import to Britain, to thousands of British 
families, since the lack of organisation was resulting 
in the futile sacrifice of hosts of soldiers, a feeling 
of urgency sprang up throughout the country, 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 149 

and an active party was at once formed to give 
it voice and to translate it into a demand for 
immediate legislation. 

Now the munitions scandal could not have 
taken place earlier : this is obvious if we con- 
sider for a moment the technical reasons of the 
delay. At the beginning of the war the British 
factories had done, on the whole, everything that 
was asked of them. They had succeeded in equip- 
ping the troops, in supplying enormous stocks of 
provisions, in building camps, and in addition 
they had done much work for the Allies. ^ In 
October 1914 munitions ran short, but the same 
thing happened at the same moment to all the 
belligerents, none of whom had foreseen the special 
form the war would take, and the supreme part 
which guns would play in it. All of them had 
the winter before them to replenish their artil- 
lery parks, to create new ones, to restock and 
then to multiply by ten or a hundred, their former 
magazines. In the spring, with the new offensive 
movements, would be seen for each belligerent 

^ Here are, according to Mr. J. M. Kennedy {Fortnightly, April 
15th), some of the orders placed during the first three months of 
the war. A single Northampton firm accepted an order for 
one million five hundred thousand boots for France. Russia 
ordered from the factories of the midlands, motor-cars to the 
value of £300,000. Sheffield and Birmingham turned out 
millions of pounds'" worth of barbed wire, hospital cots, trench 
spades, camp material and tools of all sorts. The same activity 
has prevailed in the textile factories of Leicestershire and 
Yorkshire, the foundries, armament works and dockyards of 
Coventry, Newcastle, Tyneside, and the Clyde. Add to this 
that the arsenals and gunpowder factories had to meet the 
requirements of the gigantic navy. 



150 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

the result of his labours.^ In the spring, when 
the Germans ring up their curtain, they are seen 
overwhelming the Russians under a storm of seven 
hundred shells fired in twenty-four hours and 
in the same battle, whilst the British find them- 
selves almost destitute of munitions and unable 
to attack. Nor can the War Office at this 
moment be accused of negligence. No doubt — 
and this is the great fault of the Government — 
they had omitted, when the danger was already 
understood, to arm the country for a possible 
war. But during the period under survey, in the 
course of which all alike made fresh preparations, 
they did what they could. They even foresaw the 
crisis which arose in May, and tried to stave it off. 
But whilst Germany — much richer, to start with, in 
machine tools and lathes (they are one of her 
specialties) — made use, for the manufacturing of 
her new war material, of all her engineering shops, 
which had lost their foreign markets, thus trans- 
forming her economic loss into a military advan- 
tage; whilst France could rely on the output of 
ten national factories, foundries and gunpowder 
mills, and add to these the production of many 
private establishments under military control, the 
War Office was obliged to apply to firms which, 
in order to satisfy such a sudden and unprece- 
dented demand for guns and shells, had first 
to create an enormous and most elaborate plant — 

^ On the origins of the munitions crisis see the article of Mr. 
Arthur Shadwell, " Industrial Labour and the War '* {Nineteenth 
Century, August 15th, 1915). 



THE NEED OF ADAPTATION 151 

and these were private firms, subject both to the 
confusions of free competition and to the trade 
union regulations which restrict the speed of labour. 
Against these regulations and this anarchy, against 
strikes and lock-outs, it was deprived of direct 
means ; it could only try persuasion, and it did 
try it. Several times the Government took part 
in conferences with the representatives of the 
trade unions and of the masters. In order to 
accelerate and co-ordinate the work, a central 
commission, drawn from the local committees, 
was appointed. They thought they had suc- 
ceeded; production was, in fact, multiplied three 
or four fold : it should have increased a hundred 
times. 

To give the Government the powers it lacked, 
a spontaneous movement on the part of the nation 
was required, and for such a movement England, 
to whom experience is everything, required a 
lesson, a striking object lesson. She got it ; and 
the impression was as deep as it was sudden. The 
telegram to The Times is dated May 14th, and the 
new Government, in which both parties joined to 
undertake the great necessary measures, was formed 
on the 26th. Then it is that the national effort 
begins and develops progressively, through much 
opposition, but more and more resolute, definite 
and widespread, productive of measures which go 
far beyond the original necessity — measures which 
seem to lead the country perhaps to conscrip- 
tion, at all events to paradoxical developments of 
the " voluntary system " which amount almost 



152 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

to compulsory service. Once started, the move- 
ment spreads in ever-widening circles. The ques- 
tion is no more of organising the production of 
munitions : it is of organising England. 

November 1915.^ 

^ See Appendix C. 



ADAPTATION 



In order to organise England the first thing was 
to organise public opinion. This is necessary in 
a democracy, where the State has no prestige 
and no power to command, where also it lacks 
the means of exerting pressure on public opinion. 
The newspapers are not under its orders as they 
are, more or less openly, in Germany. It is not 
served by an army of 500,000 civil servants. 
Neither university professors nor elementary 
schoolmasters are dependent on the State. It is 
not even represented by officials like our Prefets, 
who are there to direct politically their " ad- 
ministres," that is to say, the population. 

In England public opinion organises itself, and 
pretty quickly, when urgent questions arise. This 
is a result of natural adaptation; it is a form of 
reaction gradually acquired, and now become in- 
stinctive, because necessary in a country where 
no measure of national safety can be taken unless 
opinion insists upon it. At the end of May, it was 
given to the writer to see the beginning of this opera- 
tion, an operation that was to result in really organic 
changes. Its progress and each of its different 

153 



154 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

phases could be followed from day to day. First 
came the alarm bell of The Times, which all the 
great newspapers re-echoed ; then questions in Par- 
liament, meetings throughout the country, with 
speeches by the chief party leaders and popular 
speakers; — after this, letters from the public to 
the papers, examining the new question from all 
sides, many of them signed by famous names — 
authors, professors, bishops; — on the fifth day, 
the first posters, put up by the voluntary re- 
cruiting committees, summoning the workmen, 
by striking pictures, to work in the munition fac- 
tories ; and at the same time, at all the newsagents 
and on the railway bookstalls, the first propa- 
ganda pamphlets; — on the following Sunday in 
the towns, in Church and Chapel alike, sermons 
delivered by famous preachers, stimulating the 
minds to the idea of the unanimous and necessary 
effort. A week later, in a little country church, 
where the Rector was addressing his congregation 
of farmers and labourers, I heard the last vibra- 
tions of the alarm bell passing over the quiet rural 
world. 

We saw what the sensation was. England 
was realising what she lacked in order to fight 
Germany: a systematic organisation commanded 
from above. Insufiiciently directed by a party 
government which had never imagined any other 
enemy than the opposition party, left to her 
routine, to her faith in the happy tendency of 
private activities to adjust themselves mutually 
for the general welfare, England, in this war in 



ADAPTATION 155 

which industrial superiority seemed to play the 
decisive part, England, the classic country of 
mechanical industry on the great scale, had shown 
herself for ten months powerless — some people 
said openly : incompetent. Towering furnaces, 
forges, foundries, factories unceasingly covered with 
a pall of everlasting smoke, her northern and western 
counties, yet she had not been able to cast, turn, 
and forge the cannon and shells, the accumulation 
of which, still more than the numbers of the 
men, would compel victory. Such a fact seemed 
amazing and all -important. Not only did it 
leave English soldiers defenceless in face of an 
enemy who had increased his armament to an in- 
credible extent, not only did it detain in England 
the greater part of the new troops, which for lack 
of arms and munitions it was futile to send to be 
shot down by the Germans, but it discredited 
England in the eyes of many Englishmen, for it 
betrayed what seemed a national inaptitude. 
Thus it called in question the fundamental habits 
and principles of the English community. In 
these extraordinary circumstances it was clear 
that the individual should no longer be free, that 
he must serve at the post appointed for him 
by a sovereign and competent authority. The 
country had to change her whole method of life, 
the old English method of adaptation after the 
event, of adjustment under the spur of circum- 
stances. Wait and see was, when the war was 
as yet but threatening, the latest definition of 
this method : but now to wait for the facts was 
dangerous. Facts must be foreseen and provided 



156 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

against; nay, they should be compelled. It was 
no longer a question of adjustment to reality, 
but of bringing new realities into being. Thus 
sprang up the vision of, and the longing for, 
a new England, similar, but for the state of 
war, to that of which Mr. H. G. Wells had 
already sketched an ideal picture — an England 
ruled by an idea which may thus be defined : co- 
ordination, discipline, integration of the individual 
into a system, a system set up by the State for its 
own purposes, and exacting the subjection of all 
to national ends. Naturally this idea was sure to 
meet with resistance, and it still has its opponents. 
Such changes in the modes and trend of life of 
an ancient nation, attached to its habits and 
traditions, can be accepted but slowly, but such 
was the impelling force of the new idea that it 
passed at once into acts. Ten days after the 
alarm raised by The Times, the old Radical 
Government committed harakiri, and a Cabinet 
was formed such as had never been seen, for it 
brought together both parties, no doubt in order to 
attempt measures as unprecedented as itself. Then 
came the creation of a munitions department 
directed by Mr. Lloyd George, hitherto a specialist 
in democratic budgets, but now cheered by the 
Conservatives, because they know his power, and 
that no one can speak to the working men as he 
does — and he did speak to them at once, at 
Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol (June 3rd, 4th 
and 12th), and no longer of their rights, but of 
their duties and of necessary discipline. On the 
23rd of June the Munitions Act was passed, which 



ADAPTATION 157 

applied both to masters and workmen, in those 
estabhshments which were declared " controlled." ^ 
Designed to keep the men for whose labour the 
masters had been competing to their place and 
work, it limited their wages, but by another and 
still more direct interference of the State, which 
was meant to secure the acceptance of the former, 
it also limited the profits of the masters. At 
the same time it suspended Trade Union rules, 
and organised work in its main lines, though the 
details were left (for the old English tendency- 
asserted itself in spite of everything) to local and 
private initiative. Finally, on July 8th came the 
Census, together with the institution of the 
National Register, on which was to be inscribed 
the name of every English subject, man or woman, 
from fifteen to sixty-five years of age, with par- 
ticulars as to their domestic responsibilities, state 
of marriage or celibacy, trade or profession and 
the special services they can render to the nation, 
whether for industrial or military purposes. By 
this new census, by this Register which tells the 
State what use it can make of each for the good 
of all, the idea that each member of the com- 
munity, along with all the others, has a social 
duty, became visible and familiar to all, and 
people began to consider the possibility of obliga- 
tions, hitherto regarded as impracticable, in this 
classic land of individual liberty. 

^ On November 1st, 1349 factories were declared under the 
control of the Minister of Munitions. At the end of January 
1916, Mr. Lloyd George announced the existence of 2500 war 
factories employing 1,500,000 men and 250,000 women. 



158 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 



II 

It seems that the Register, which allows citizens 
to classify according to the services they can 
render to the State, should have been hailed with 
delight by all parties of socialistic tendencies. In 
England more than anywhere else, war, which 
they professed to abominate, is bringing into being 
the system of their dreams. Of this they are 
aware, and when the war is over they hope 
to preserve as much as they please of the new 
measures.^ From them, nevertheless, arose the 
chief resistance, which assumed different and shift- 
ing forms. On the whole, a few leaders alone are 
bound by their writings and declarations to un- 
changeable doctrines; those whom they wish to 
lead are influenced by impressions that vary ac- 
cording to circumstances and experience, and 
which Germany did her best from the beginning 
to turn more and more against herself. There 
are the plain Radicals — a party that has always 
disapproved of war — some of them impenitent 
pacifists, all of them opposed, before any debate, 
and out of principle, to conscription — but most of 
them, in the long run, yield to obvious necessity. 
There are the workmen, socialists and unionists, 
who dislike it too, and besides, oppose the law 
that suspends the rights and rules of their trade 
unions — but they are the great mass of England, 
consequently rather indifferent to the philosophical 
expression of principles, and capable of practical 

^ Hyndman, Fortnightly Review, March 14th, 1915. 



ADAPTATION 159 

common sense. These realise by degrees what a 
war with Germany means. As it gradually de- 
velops (it takes them time to change their ideas), 
as a result, above all, of the insults and crimes 
of the enemy, patriotic feelings begin to rise in 
them, together with that fighting instinct which 
lies at the bottom of every Englishman, that 
dogged resolution, if the opponent is worth the 
effort, to have the best of the fight. Follow- 
ing upon the munitions scandal, a few leaders of 
the Labour Party, Messrs. Roberts, Ben Tillett, 
and Hodge, founded the " Socialist Committee for 
National Defence " (July 21st). These leaders re- 
ject the principle of compulsory service, but they 
are all the more fervent in preaching voluntary 
enlistment. Lastly, there are the incorruptibles, 
the inflexibles, the fanatics of the Independent 
Labour Party, who do not oppose only conscrip- 
tion, but all forms of national service, military 
or industrial, voluntary or compulsory — in fact, 
the idea of going on with the war — and who 
pledge themselves not to take part in the re- 
cruiting propaganda — nay, in war work of any 
kind, or to work in any establishment brought 
by the new law under State control. 

One idea all these groups have fought from the 
beginning — ^that of compulsion; and some seem 
bent on fighting it to the end. This is a paradox 
of which we had already caught a glimpse : whilst 
the Conservatives, suddenly eager for justice 
and less anxious than usual for liberty, demand 
the innovation which will make every citizen a 
servant of the State, the enemies of the estab- 



160 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

lished social order, of the old individualistic laisser- 
faire, those who were talking before the war of 
" nationalising " certain industries, in fact, the 
ancient champions of the rights of the State, 
attack the new idea of social discipline, and this 
in the name of the rights of the individual. 
Some, even, discovering beauties they had never 
suspected in the main principle of the old sys- 
tem, appeal to the historic " liberties of the sub- 
ject " — nay, to quote a Radical like Mr. Hobhouse, 
to the " fundamental traditions of the kingdom." 
Conscription appears to them, so says another 
Radical, Mr. Lansbury, as a revolution ; and this 
word they utter with the same reprobation as 
Burke in 1790, or Tennyson at the memories of 
'48. With Herbert Spencer, whose book was an 
attack on all the dogmas of socialism, and whose 
words they now seem to remember, they have 
become the champions of " liberty against govern- 
ment." Quite unexpectedly these former cham- 
pions of the State against the individual, these 
upholders of an international collectivism born 
in Germany and France, feel a sudden enthu- 
siasm for the ancient and peculiarly English idea, 
from which sprang the liberalism of all other 
countries, and which produced the long and 
strenuous resistance of England to the socialist 
propaganda. The last argument that might have 
been expected from these friends of humanity, 
from these apostles of universal reason, is that 
conscription is " contrary to the genius of the 
English people." Declining now to subordinate 
the individual to the needs of the State, refusing 



ADAPTATION 161 

to seek salvation elsewhere than through indi- 
vidual initiative, these defenders of the proleta- 
riat suddenly find themselves in sympathy with 
the liberal, capitalist, and middle-class school of 
Manchester, which, laying down as its initial 
principle the absolute liberty of the individual, 
and deducing therefrom the unconditional rights 
of property, bound the two dogmas together into 
one sacred formula. 

The reason is that, in general, socialism aims 
especially at the happiness of individuals, of indi- 
viduals of a certain class — true it is that they 
form the vast majority. It is interested much 
less in society, conceived as a distinct, collective 
being, which another society might attack, and 
the idea of which demands sacrifices, than in the 
well-being of a certain social category. The proof 
of this is that these same English socialists — I 
refer chiefly to a few leaders — still insist, when it 
is a question of class war, on recommending the 
discipline and even the compulsory measures, 
which horrify them when it is only the national 
war that is in question. They do not allow the 
State to bind the workman to a certain task in the 
national machinery of defence, but they are quite 
ready to force him, by actual compulsion, to enter 
the war machine which a trade union is. In 
obedience to the rules of his trade union, to the 
orders of his managing committee, he must strike, 
he must reduce his hours of work, he must slacken 
his speed, or refuse this or that particular piece of 
work. For these people, the real war is not that 
which the country is waging against Germany : the 

M 



162 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

idea of a Germany bent upon conquests has not 
yet dawned upon their minds. The war they wish 
to wage is still the domestic war which their party 
or their unions carry on against the masters whom 
they know, the war which they would like to 
carry on against the whole of that capitalist class, 
which revolutionary socialism, continental in its 
origin, and of relatively recent importation, points 
out as its natural enemy. Theirs is a class 
patriotism, and for the class-war they consider 
just and necessary the discipline and the organisa- 
tion which they will not let English patriotism 
impose on every Englishman for the national war. 
In fact, in comparison with the class-war, the 
only one that counts for them, because chronic and 
world wide, the latter seems nothing to them but 
a " local and passing phase," of which the masters 
and capitalists — all those, in short, whom they call 
the English Junkers — ^wish to take advantage, in 
order to realise their long-standing desire, which is 
to militarise the country and stop the right to 
strike. Such were the ideas uttered in London 
(July 29th), at the Miners' Congress, by the presi- 
dent of their federation, Mr. Robert Smillie. He 
fails to see that this " passing phase " may be like 
a shell which indeed passes, but kills — that it may 
kill not only England, as Mr. Lloyd George said at 
Liverpool when speaking to the working men, but 
the Labour Party too, and that if, for instance, 
the metal industries were to be paralysed by a 
strike like the Welsh coal strike, which threatened 
about that time to reduce the navy to impotence, 
but which according to certain socialists " saved 



ADAPTATION 163 

democracy," democracy would run great risk of 
dying saved. To turn the eyes of these partisans 
from their too Hmited point of view and awake 
them to the reahties of the war and of the pubKc 
danger, one thing is lacking, a thing all the more 
necessary because, in order to understand and 
form an opinion, the English mind requires direct 
sensations and images : that is, the actual ex- 
perience, or the memories of an invasion. In- 
deed for some — they are not numerous — it seems 
doubtful whether this would be sufficient. Mr. 
Thomas, M.P., who claims to speak in the name 
of the railway men, does not hesitate to predict 
a general railway strike if conscription is adopted. 
The Daily News (September 8th, 1915) says that 
" no price is too high to pay for victory, except 
the abandonment of the cause for which England 
stands by the acceptance of conscription." The 
idea which is current and which was formulated by 
Mr. Bernard Shaw (who instantly and instinctively 
took side against English contentions and in- 
terests), is that, " under a pretence of fighting 
Prussian militarism, an attempt is being made 
to militarise England." 

It is not merely in the name of the Rights of 
the Subject that many socialists, who belong to 
dissenting denominations, oppose compulsory ser- 
vice ; it is in the name of a principle much more 
ancient and, spiritually, powerful, to which their 
French comrades would no more think of appeal- 
ing than to that of individual liberty : I mean 
the Christian idea — faith in the God of the Bible, 



164 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

in His Commands, in His Revelation and Judg- 
ment. This principle is held by men of every class, 
and those who base upon it their arguments 
against compulsory service and warfare of every 
kind, are to be found in every social grade : they 
are represented alike in the House of Commons 
and the House of Lords. " Some of us," says 
a manifesto of the No- Conscription Fellowship, 
" have formed our convictions under the influ- 
ence of the Internationalist movement, others 
owe them to their Christian religion." In its 
English, protestant and puritan form, this reli- 
gion, bringing the solitary soul face to face with 
a Divine Judge, makes it strictly responsible for 
all its acts. If a man kills, it is no excuse that he 
was ordered to do so, even in the case of a soldier, 
by his superior officer : as we have seen, the 
English common law does not recognise this ex- 
cuse. His conscience is his stronghold, which he 
must hold and on no account surrender. As Sir 
A. Ham worth said (October 4th), when presiding 
over a representative assembly of English and 
Welsh Congregationalists, a man's last refuge is 
his conscience; that is the foundation of every- 
thing; it is the absolute. Now "conscription is 
the most direct attack on liberty of conscience; 
it deprives men both of their responsibility and 
their liberty, to change them into serfs or slaves " ; 
it robs a man of " his soul, which belongs but to 
him." And, in more general terms, war is a state 
of sin which must be suppressed at all costs, a 
revolt against the Christian command of peace 
and non-resistance to evil. " Your Country and 



ADAPTATION 165 

your King want you," said the recruiting bills 
and pamphlets. " God, our Father in Heaven, 
and suffering humanity want you," said a propa- 
gandist postcard issued by the pacifists. " Make 
use of your influence to stop this war, without 
regard to any earthly interest, for the love of 
Jesus Christ who taught heroic self-sacrifice, and 
love stronger than hatred and death." ^ 

This is, indeed, the pure Christian principle, 
more active amongst the Dissenters — Methodists, 
Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, who claim 
a closer adherence to the customs and ideas of the 
primitive Church — the same principle which the 
Anglicans also recognise in their prayers for 
the enemy (" overcome evil with good "), but 
which, for all that, Anglicanism, born of a com- 
promise, and which never was very particular 
about logical sequences, by no means applies to 
the existing circumstances — and the less so as it 
sees and represents the present war as a war 
against the " Devil," just as the socialists and 
pacifists — those, at least, who approve of it or 
tolerate it — ^regard and explain it as a " war 
against war." Nevertheless, even amongst the 

1 In a pamphlet which the pacifists tried to circulate at 
recruiting meetings, Dr. Alfred Salter, Labour candidate for 
Bermondsey, said : " Can you imagine Jesus Christ, dressed in 
khaki, plunging a bayonet into the breast of a German work- 
man? The Son of God firing a machine-gun against an am- 
bushed German column? The Man of Sorrows in a cavalry 
charge, thrusting, hacking, stabbing, smashing, yelling hur- 
rahs ? No, no, such pictures are impossible, and that decides 
the question for me; I cannot regard even defensive war as 
permissible. I cannot, therefore, advise any one to engage 
and take part in, what I consider, wicked and sinful." 



166 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

Anglicans, there are some, of high official position, 
closely attached, one would think by their pro- 
fessional duties, to the old social system and 
tradition, who, looking at the matter from the 
purely Christian point of view, blame their country 
for drawing the sword. The Head Master of Eton 
(the chief of those schools of the upper caste which 
have handed down for centuries, to each new 
generation, the aristocratic traditions and dis- 
cipline). Dr. Lyttelton, declared in the pulpit that 
the English people were not innocent of the war : 
they had not lived according to the law of Christ; 
they had been greedy and selfish. And in another 
sermon, in which he took as his text the parable 
of the Pharisee and the Publican, he made use of 
the main German argument : " For forty years 
past the Central Powers have felt themselves 
hemmed in, and the methods of this policy are 
none too creditable to us." ^ Others — the chaplain 
of a college in Cambridge, for instance — point out 
that the Church of Christ is an international, and 
not a national institution, and denounce the arch- 
bishops " who speak, with reference to the war, 
of the menace to the liberty and safety of England 
and to her position amongst the nations; as if 
the danger or the urgency could change in any way 
the commands of the Prince of Peace." No doubt 
in the University of Cambridge, ten thousand of 
whose sons have enlisted — in this ancient strong- 
hold of the higher classes, such language is excep- 
tional. But Cambridge, in her old days, was a 

1 Sermon preached at Overstrand, Norfolk, August 19th, 
1915. 



ADAPTATION 167 

stronghold, also, of puritanism and evangelicalism. 
It is, perhaps, because evangelicalism was trans- 
muted in some minds into an active and doctri- 
naire idealism, that a professor of some repute like 
Mr. Pigou ventured to brave general opinion by 
advocating, in May 1915, a form of peace " which 
would not wound German susceptibilities," and 
that a master, who is also a writer of great talent, 
Mr. Lowes Dickinson, denounced as mischievous 
the division of nations into States of different 
names — that is to say, the very notion of patriot- 
ism.i All these philosophers and moralists present 
one common feature : each follows the same idea 
which inspired him before the war. They have 
not, to speak like Mr. Chesterton when he con- 
trasted the insanity of systems with the sanity 
of common sense, been struck by the unforeseen 
blow which violently awakens the man of one 
idea to the vision of the real world, with all 
its irrational complexity, and smashes to atoms 
the fictitious and all too logical universe which 
he has built up for himself by interpreting every- 
thing from his own point of view. The blow fell 
on the Continent, too far away from them : their 
dream may have been disturbed for a moment, 
but they soon plunged into it again. 

Less pure, more mixed with political passion, 
seems the idealism of certain leaders of the 
Independent Labour Party, the organ through 
which, we were recently informed by Mr. Ramsay 
MacDonald, " the Divine Will is at work." Startled 
by the crime which Germany committed when her 
^ The War and the Way out of it, by G. Lowes Dickinson. 



168 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

armies broke into Belgium, this leader appeared at 
first to accept the war : but he quickly recovered, 
declaring first that the crimes of the Germans 
against civilians were not proved, and then joining 
the enemy in attacking Sir Edward Grey, as one 
of the instigators of the war, accusing him of 
having " played a pretty little game of hypocrisy," 
and " of having worked deliberately to involve 
England in the war, whilst making use of Belgium 
as an excuse." Still more impervious to the at- 
tacks of the real, still more immovably tied to his 
system, to his one-idea'd interpretation of English 
and French affairs, Mr. E. D. Morel, the son of a 
Frenchman, continues to attack both his adopted 
country and the land of his birth, differing in this 
from Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who, in 
Germany, only damns his native country in order 
to devote himself more completely to his adopted 
fatherland. He had always attacked the Entente 
with France, advocated an understanding with 
Germany, supported the contentions of the latter 
power, and opposed all French enterprise in 
Morocco ; now he founds the Union of Democratic 
Control, which has for one of its objects to prevent, 
at the conclusion of peace, the humiliation of 
Germany, and the real intentions of which become 
more evident, as the founder more clearly im- 
putes the responsibility for the catastrophe to 
England and France. Naturally, his philosophy 
of the war delights the enemy, who does not fail 
to translate his pronouncements, and to publish 
the names of the few just men who remain in 
England : a Burns, a MacDonald, a Morel, a 



ADAPTATION 169 

Ponsonby, a Norman Angel, a Trevelyan, a 
Shaw, a Bertrand RusselL In reality these " pro- 
Germans " are but fanatical pacifists, who, seeing 
all their theories contradicted by the fact of the 
war, have but one idea — ^to prove that they were 
right; that in order to avoid the catastrophe, 
England's goodwill alone was necessary; — and 
since the war happened after all, to stop it at 
once, at all costs. The great lesson of the event 
which is shaking the world — namely, that the 
world is not governed by reason, that irrational 
forces (sentiment, pride, collective dreams, fanati- 
cism, will to power and to conquest) are always 
latent in nations, producing by their explosions 
the great upheavals of History, just as the sub- 
terranean forces of the globe shaped in the past 
— and may again to-morrow shatter — the land 
on which quiet harvests are now growing; that 
truth reigns no more than reason, since sixty-five 
million Germans sincerely believe that which is not, 
and since, if they conquer, their delusion and the lie 
of their masters will prevail : this lesson has failed 
to impress itself on these theorists and dreamers, 
who did not feel, like their brothers in France, the 
earth trembling and ready to open under their feet. 
A significant feature is that when they write about 
the war, it is to discuss how it may be turned to 
profit by English socialism. The idea never seems 
to occur to them that England might be beaten, 
and that her defeat would put an end, at least for 
a time, to many hopes of their socialism. 

Fortunately, their influence did not last. At 



170 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

the very beginning, when the Germans invaded 
and devastated Belgium, it underwent a sudden 
and very rapid fall. Men who denied the possi- 
bility of the catastrophe by enlarging on the 
humanity and fraternity of Germany, seem less 
competent to point out the path of salvation,^ 
and, besides, the enemy always undertakes to turn 
against himself the forces of sentiment and ideal- 
ism that persist in his favour. If Mr. Morel and 
Mr. Ramsay MacDonald are sincere (and we should 
assume that they are), if they have not lost all 
power of feeling through their determination to 
prove themselves right, how do they react to the 
crimes committed in Armenia by those whom 
Germany has let loose and whom she directs? 
What did they feel when they heard of the 
murder of Miss Cavell? For such a crime there 
is no possible palliation. Whatever may be the 
letter of the military code invented by the enemy, 
and on which he bases his right, it is enough to 
remember what this noble woman represented, her 
lofty and modest behaviour in the presence of 
death, her last whispered words of Christian 
charity and forgiveness — it is enough to look at 
that clear-cut, self-restrained, kind and brave 
face, which incarnates all that is best in a people 
and the essence of a civilisation, to execrate such a 
deed, carried out in cold blood, with judicial form, 
by representatives of the German Government, 

^ A distinguished member of the House of Lords, who, in the 
autumn of 1915, spoke in favour of peace, had written in 1913 : 
" Time will show that the Germans have no aggressive designs, 
and fools will then stop talking about a war which will never take 
place."' 



ADAPTATION 171 

who sought to prevent the possible intervention of 
neutrals by their lies and their cunning. Not only 
do such crimes as these deprive those leaders who 
in England are called " pro -Germans " of their 
followers, but it seems that they must rouse and 
turn against Germany that humanitarian sensitive- 
ness which, through hatred of war and militarism, 
has done so much to help the designs of those 
Prussian militarists who are responsible for the war. 
It seems . . . But when it is a question of 
leaders, bound by their creeds and thus com- 
pelled to a certain attitude, one never can tell. 
At the end of November the horror of conscrip- 
tion, on which the Government seemed to have 
decided unless Lord Derby's experiment should 
prove a success, induced them to break the cautious 
silence which for some time they had maintained. 
But the people no longer tolerates their pacific de- 
monstrations, and this they learn at their expense. ^ 
But their usual public, on the contrary, free to 
change its opinion, and open to the lesson of facts, 
deserts them more and more. A month after the 
shocking affair at Brussels, it will be seen, at the 
Merthyr election, that their followers have left 
them. 



Ill 

And again, upon the workmen, little given in 
this country to dreams or philosophy, pacifism, 
properly so called, never had any strong hold. By 

^ Meeting at the Memorial Hall under the auspices of the 
U.D.C. (Nov. 29th). Similar fiascos took place in the provinces. 



172 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

temperament, besides, they are combative, and 
enjoy a dogged contest with closed mouth; they 
are fighters. Once the real nature of the enemy, 
of the war and of the public peril, becomes clear to 
them they will enlist ; they did enlist by hundreds 
of thousands; and those who are already at the 
front have shown how they can attack, and hold 
their trenches. But the majority began by not 
understanding, especially those of the West, where 
the coast is not exposed to German raids. For a 
very long time they saw nothing in the war but the 
" passing phase " of which one of their representa- 
tives spoke. They scarcely distinguished it from 
those colonial wars which England always ends so 
successfully, and which in their opinion result in en- 
riching army contractors, in opening up new fields of 
enterprise to capitalists, and increasing the Empire, 
without increasing wages for any length of time. 
They are honest, they have a very strong sense of 
right and wrong ; but their mental vision is limited 
to their experience, to their own peculiar and im- 
mediate surroundings, to their trades-unions and 
their strikes : they do not easily change their ideas. 
Such is in England the general psychology of the 
more numerous — that is to say, of the more 
ignorant, whose opinion is the governing force, 
and whom it is necessary, in order that the country 
may adapt itself to the danger, to instruct and 
persuade — which requires time. Nothing has come 
to them of all those translations of Treitschke, 
Bernhardi, and other pan-Germanists, which en- 
lightened almost at once another section of the 
public as to the real meaning of the war — of this 



ADAPTATION ITS 

war of nations, of which a man of their standard 
of culture, an honest soldier of the regular army, 
was heard to say with a shrug : " When we've 
pounded these Johnnies I suppose we'll give 'em 
'Ome Rule, same as we did the Boers." 

Now those who did not understand are those 
who remained behind; and we should not forget 
this when considering the too prolonged indiffer- 
ence, in certain regions, of the working-class to 
the country's need, worse still some of their actions 
which ran counter to measures of organisation — 
when we consider also their occasional wilful 
delays and the irregularity of their labour. For 
those who did not understand, and who remained 
behind, are too often those who, morally and in- 
tellectually, are worth least. It is a fact that, from 
the beginning, the appeal to conscience (and this 
drawback, amongst a hundred others of voluntary 
service, was one of the earliest to be seen) acted 
especially on the most conscientious, and conse- 
quently on the most sober, the most faithful and 
attentive to their technical duties : in fact, many 
of these enlisted in the first days of the war, who 
had to be sent back to the factory. Inferior 
workmen took their places, semi-skilled and un- 
skilled — often unreliable workmen, drunkards, only 
intermittently employed until then, but to whom 
the masters, in those days of increased orders 
and decreased labour, offered amazing wages : an 
exciting piece of luck, certain to send the intem- 
perate to the public house. We know how much 
Mr. Lloyd George believed this to be a reason 
of the early failures of the industrial effort. 



174 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

Other results of this survival of the unfit were 
not less disastrous; at the moment when the 
national war ought to have united all classes and 
turned all minds in one direction, by an indirect 
effect of the war itself, the chronic struggle be- 
tween masters and workmen, and more generally 
speaking, between capital and labour, had become 
keener. For those who remained behind and did 
not understand, the chief enemy now — an enemy 
more disliked than ever — ^was the master and the 
shareholder, enriched by the enormous orders of 
the British and Allied Governments; it was for- 
gotten that wages had increased as well as profits. 
The fact is that by an effect of the new state of 
things — vast State loans, allowances to soldiers' 
dependants. Government control of railways — the 
Socialist dream has assumed more glowing and 
exciting colours : in fact, those whom it inspires 
hope that, by the time peace comes, it will have 
been completely realised as a result of the war. 
Meanwhile, the main thing was to push vigorously 
the fight against the masters, to abandon none of 
the earlier conquests, and, the logic of self-interest 
prevailing over the logic of ideas, to resist the new 
law which, under the pretence of national defence, 
suspended in certain establishments the rights and 
powers of the trade unions — as it suspended also 
the liberty of the masters.^ 

^ Manifestoes of the Trade Union Rights Committee, established 
in London after the passing of the Munitions Act, to oppose the 
application of this Act. In the so-called " controlled '-'- estab- 
lishments, the profits of the shareholders and owners are limited 
to the average of the three years antecedent to the war, in- 
creased by 20 per cent. With regard to the rise of wages brought 



ADAPTATION 175 

But this movement had not waited for the 
Munitions Act. During the early disturbance of 
trade conditions caused by the war, under the 
influence, especially, of the idea that the share- 
holders' profits were too high, strikes had taken 
place which threatened the country's powers of de- 
fence. We remember that of the Clyde dockyards 
(February 1915), when 20,000 engineers suspended 
work. On the intervention of a special State 
commission,^ founded in the course of the war to 
deal with such cases, they resumed work, but 
only in appearance (ca' canny work), applying in 
a literal sense the rules of their unions, which 
deliberately restrict speed of production. Observe 
that they were not supported by their represen- 
tatives, who belong to that class of skilled work- 
men which, at the beginning, gave but too many 
volunteers to the army : such, even, was the dis- 
agreement in these Clyde strikes, between the 
members of the union and their representatives, that 
the latter had to resign. In the same way, before 
the crisis in May, the presidents of thirty-five 
unions, summoned to confer with the Government, 

about by the enormous orders of the State, and the gradual 
diminution of the workers as enlistments increased, the Leeds 
Co-operative Record has given interesting statistics. In the 
shops of the Industrial Co-operative Society of this town, where 
50,000 workmen obtain their provisions, purchases are seen, if 
the statistics of the first three months of 1914 be compared with 
those of 1915, to rise by 15 to 86 per cent., according to the kind 
of goods. Purchases of jewellery rose 65 per cent. In the north 
of England a good factory hand, says Mr. R. RadclifEe {English 
Review, January 1916), can make since the begin-ning of the 
war £10 a week. That is why the Government has dared to 
establish new taxes on food. 
^ Committee of Production. 



176 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

which felt already concerned at the slowness and 

irregularity of production, undertook to give up 

during the war the right to strike and agreed 

to suspend the rules which delayed work. It 

was because the ordinary members w^ould not 

be bound by this pledge that it was necessary, 

in June, to have recourse to the Munitions Act. 

But for a long time yet the situation remained 

the same : no sooner was the law passed than it 

immediately met with resistance ; committees were 

formed for the defence of the trades unions against 

all legislation intended to diminish or abolish 

their activity and their rights. In the view of 

the workmen, it was the charter of their class, 

slowly and laboriously won, which they now 

had to defend against the encroachments of the 

State, and they did it with the same determined 

sense of duty as, of old, the House of Commons 

when it was up against the tyrannies of the Tudors 

and Stuarts. In June and July, in those Welsh 

coal-fields, where 60,000 miners had voluntarily 

enlisted as soldiers, two great strikes, in rapid 

succession (the second undertaken against the 

advice, and contrary to the promises of the union 

representatives, and in spite of the efforts and 

offers of the Board of Trade), warned the new 

Government that they must put off any project of 

conscription, and that such a law, if the attempt 

were made to apply it then, would provoke riots. 

And not only did the miners refuse to recognise 

the recent act, which was to keep them to their 

work; but, asserting their ancient right to strike, 

they declared their intention at once to make 



ADAPTATION 177 

use of it in order to obtain a rise of 20 per cent, 
in their wages; and the State, which thought 
to intervene and apply against them the new 
powers with which it had been armed, had finally 
to help them to obtain the half of their demand ; 
that is to say, what they were asking before the 
war. In vain did the Government publish the 
recent Royal Proclamation forbidding controlled 
industries to strike, in vain did it try to apply the 
compulsory arbitration, advised by the union 
officials and required by the law. The law re- 
mained a dead letter. After this experience no 
further attempt has been made, in any similar case, 
to apply the legal fines and restraints, no matter 
how much the army may have suffered from such 
strikes. Nearly two months later, at Bristol 
(September 9th), at the Trades Union Congress, 
Mr. Lloyd George is still engaged in proving that 
the manufacture of shells and guns must be acceler- 
ated. He is challenged to prove, what his audience 
seem to regard as much more important, that 
the State has kept its promise " to intercept, in 
the controlled establishments, all excessive profits 
of the masters." He proves it by documentary 
evidence. But there is no further mention of the 
legal penalties directed against the wage-earners 
and their unions. There is no further effort at 
persuasion, except the usual appeal to their sense 
of right and wrong. Documentary evidence is 
put before them to show that the State is strictly 
observing the contract made with the trades 
unions, but that the latter often fail to do so. For 
example, at a time when 80,000 skilled workmen 

N 



178 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

and 200,000 labourers are required in the arma- 
ment works, the engineers, at Woolwich Arsenal, 
still continue to obstruct the employment of un- 
skilled men; in certain factories of Wales, the 
local committee of the union will not allow them 
to touch a lathe; in one particular factory for 
making machine tools, the same prohibition applies 
to women; in the arsenals of Enfield, Coventry 
and Woolwich, men who work too quickly are 
treated as blacklegs. In short, the unions are 
shown that by their " rules and customs " (Mr. 
Lloyd George's own words : and how well they 
help us to understand the peculiar point of view 
of these workmen — indeed, of these trade guilds 
of England !), they are restraining and hampering 
the fighting power of the country, ^ 

By September, however, the workmen began to 
understand. The Union officials, in discussion 
with Mr. Lloyd George, far from insisting, as 
they surely would have done at the time of the 
Welsh strikes, on defending the principle of the 

^ One of the chief objects of solicitude on the part of the 
trade unions is to prevent what has been called dilution of 
labour — the admission of unskilled men and women to work 
along with the skilled. 

Shortly after his speech at Bristol, Mr. Lloyd George quoted 
this curious letter as one which had been sent to the members of a 
union at Coventry by the secretary of the committee : " Com- 
rades, please note that C. He wit began at 7 p.m. to finish a 
bracket and to fix a breech bracket on a 4'5 mortar, and that 
he will probably have done by 5 o'clock in the morning, which 
means 8| hours for a 31| hours' job. It is not the first time 
that complaints have been addressed to me with regard to 
this man, who is working at more than double time, for which 
I cannot find if he has been booked. I should be glad if members 
would take a minute to look at him." Two months later the 
trade unions disputed the authenticity of this letter. 



ADAPTATION 179 

actions complained of, began basing their defence 
on denials, or assertions of the exceptional nature 
of the case; and, when at a meeting he proved 
the truth of his charges by documentary evidence, 
and called on them to use all their influence and 
power against such scandals, they actually cheered 
him. By September, in fact, the idea of Eng- 
land's danger and of an Englishman's duty had 
at last reached this social sphere, and aroused there 
the determination to fight and win the war. Of 
the silent progress of this feeling there was a 
striking demonstration six weeks later. In the 
heart of Wales, an election was held at Merthyr, 
a stronghold of the Labour Party and of that ex- 
treme Syndicalism of which Mr. Keir Hardie has 
so long carried the flag. Helped by Mr. Ramsay 
MacDonald, the eloquent pacifist, and by Mr. 
Henderson, the Labour member of the Cabinet, 
the Independent Labour Party had at its disposal 
all the resources of money and organisation to 
secure the return of its candidate, who was at 
once a local leader, and president of a great 
federation of miners. Well, amongst these very 
miners, the man who was elected by an enormous 
majority was, contrary to all expectations, the war 
candidate, a free lance, who had declared himself 
ready to vote for " double conscription, if it's 
necessary to win the war." 

Such a fact was a revelation of the change accom- 
plished, and the Labour minister, Mr. Henderson, 
who took part in the campaign against the new 
member, saw this so clearly that from that moment 
he became a supporter of the Conscription Bill the 



180 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

Government was then beginning to prepare. But 
generally, amongst the union officials, amongst the 
delegates to the Trade Union Congress, even 
amongst those who, as we have seen, declined 
to support strikes, and must therefore tacitly 
recognise the utility of the special war legislation, 
conversion is less apparent; it is accompanied by 
reserves and even some backsliding. What they 
reserve, what they will repeatedly reassert, are the 
principles, the full principles, of the party. In 
order to understand the apparent contradictions 
which, even after Mr. Stanton's election, are so 
puzzling to the observer, one must take into 
account the mystical worship of formulas, of 
those dogmas, for which a party man is ever ready 
to fight as a soldier for his flag. One must bear 
in mind also that these leaders and delegates, who 
were elected for the most part long before the 
Merthyr election, are naturally unwilling to eat 
their own words. In fact, one must take into ac- 
count simple human self-respect. This goes far to 
explain the success of Mr. Lloyd George. If these 
professed anti-militarists are willing to listen to 
him, it is largely because they cannot suspect him 
of thinking : "I told you so." They remember 
his disbelief in the German menace, his sarcasms 
at the war prophets who advised the country 
to arm : hence the confidence with which they 
now listen to him. One of their countrymen, 
who knows them well, thus summed up this 
psychology : " If we were wrong, they'll say, so 
was he ! " But don't expect them to acknow- 
ledge in a " resolution " that they were wrong. 



ADAPTATION 181 

They don't know, like their more adroit French 
comrades, how to veil the contradiction between 
the abstract principle which they will once more 
assert and the particular measure which they 
perceive to be necessary. They will contradict 
themselves openly; in the very same sitting of 
the very same congress, one of their votes will 
refer to the principle, and the other to the 
existing situation, which demands conscription to 
secure victory. The foreigner may wonder at 
such inconsistency, but one thing was made clear 
by that Merthyr election in November : the work- 
people have at last understood, and are resolved 
on a fight to a finish, even at the price of con- 
scription. At last they are at one with the 
general movement of the country. In a word, 
England is now going to wage a national war — 
perhaps the first in all her history.^ 



IV 

Towards the end of 1915 nothing else is talked 
of in England but conscription. To these work- 
men it is the greatest sacrifice, that of their liberty 
— in their eyes the fundamental condition of their 
human dignity. Because their fighting instincts 
are now turned against Germany, because they 
are bent on "winning the war," they accept it; 
but only if it is made clear to them that there 
is no other path to victory and, after complete 
proof, that the appeal to conscience will not suffice 
^ See Appendix D. 



182 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

to raise the necessary numbers. It will suffice, 
they have been and still are assured by the 
Liberals, Radicals, and Socialists, by all those 
whose political philosophy is based on an opti- 
mistic faith in the natural goodness of man, in 
the supreme powers of conscience and reason; 
and the keener these opponents of conscription 
are, the more desperately do they desire to make 
it appear useless by showing all that can be done 
by the appeal to conscience. It is therefore the 
men of the most advanced opinions (excluding 
always the militant pacifists, those members of 
the old Radical Cabinet who resigned at the begin- 
ning of the war, the friends of Mr. Morel, the 
readers of the Labour Leader, and the stalwarts 
of the Independent Labour Party), it is these 
advanced spirits, from the ordinary Radicals to 
the trade-union officials, who now more and more 
undertake to push on the recruiting campaign. 
For some months already Labour leaders had 
been active in this direction; I refer to those 
who, at the end of May, founded the Socialist 
Committee for National Defence, and who had 
several times received confidential information 
from the Government. They had been told, for 
instance, at the beginning of the summer, that 
the higher classes having given all their sons, con- 
scription could no longer be avoided unless a spon- 
taneous movement on the part of the workmen 
raised the rate of enlistment. This information 
was repeated at the beginning of the autumn, 
when Lord Derby's system was about to be ap- 
plied. Mr. Lloyd George said that the number 



ADAPTATION 183 

of recruits coming in must make up for the Russian 
retreat.^ In the spring of 1916 England must 
have new armies at her disposal. To this end 
30,000 recruits a week must at once be got. If 
the leaders of the working classes wish to avoid 
conscription they must do their best to find these 
recruits, and they are given till November 30th to 
show what they can do with the voluntary system. 
Thereupon, Messrs. Hodge, Barnes, Crooks and 
Ben Tillett set to work again; trade-union dele- 
gates are taken once more on trips to the front; 
are shown the trenches and battlefields ; talk with 
officers and men; come back provided with facts 
and documents : There are not even yet enough 
shells and bombs ; the soldiers are dying for lack 
of ammunition — dying for eighteenpence a day, 
with a curse on their lips for those comrades 
who, in the factories, are receiving a wage of six 
to eight shillings for a slack day's work. The 
losses every week are such and such, the gaps 
must be filled up, or the line abandoned; they 
must be much more than merely filled up, if any 
advance is to be made; and they add this argu- 
ment, which says a great deal as to the ignorance 
of a sovereign people which needs to see and 
touch in order to believe, as to the paradox, at 
least in war-time, of the democratic principle of 
government by public opinion : " Yes, it is abso- 
lutely true ; we have seen it with our own eyes : 
in France, all fit men are soldiers; in town and 
country alike we have seen no civilians but the 
women, children and old men. We insist on 

^ Through Terror to Triumph (September 1916). 



184 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

this because we know that many of our comrades 
do not beHeve it, and several of ourselves did not 
believe it when we left England." ^ As a result 
of this new organised effort at persuasion, the 
weekly average of recruits rises — some enlisting 
to bear arms and serve their king in the fighting 
line for eighteenpence a day; others at their 
own sweet will, because they like fighting less or 
money more, enlisting for home service in those 
new industrial khaki regiments, where, it is true, 
the workmen's charter is suspended, but where 
wages are those of peace time, and even much 
higher for extra time and work. There remains 
that interesting residue of those, whose dislike of 
work almost equals their natural horror of fighting, 
and who prefer to smoke their cigarettes outside 
their public-houses. In short, the higher the man's 
moral worth, the harder his lot, and the best alone 
are sent to the firing line. 

This is an injustice and a danger; it is the 
essential defect in the system, that from which 
all the others spring. The longer the system was 
applied the more obvious did this defect become, 
till it could be no more accepted by this English 
conscience which had meant to appeal to nothing 
but conscience. It is the very success of the 
system which reveals its inherent flaw. By 
November 1915 all the men of spirit, all those 
who make for the nobleness and worth of a country, 

1 I quote this from memory. But compare the almost identical 
report of the deputation of Manchester war workers published in 
the papers in September. 



ADAPTATION 185 

have enlisted, after which the struggle against 
conscription favours but a morally inferior minority 
— the " slackers y From this time on it is the in- 
dolence, the indifference, or the selfishness of this 
minority — which is certainly not England — that 
is being defended by the resolve to defend the 
principles of England; it is for the "slackers'" 
sake that the country foregoes the decisive ad- 
vantage which she would derive from a fighting 
machine concentrating all the forces of the nation 
and all its available human material. And, worse 
still, if the inferior minority, who are deaf to 
the appeals of conscience, are not yet England, 
they threaten one day to become England, 
through the survival of the unfit that must 
ensue upon the spontaneous self-sacrifice of the 
conscientious. 

The system is seen, then, to be not merely un- 
just, but harmful in its outcome. All the same, 
it is the injustice which causes the obvious and 
immediate difficulty. For instance, for young 
bachelors of twenty and twenty-five to remain 
peacefully smoking their cigarettes in the streets, 
whilst heads of families are risking death, is evi- 
dently unjust; but it also involves extra expense 
to the State, for every unmarried soldier costs 
only eighteenpence a day and his keep, whilst 
in the case of each married volunteer a wife and 
almost always several children must be provided 
for. It was calculated in the month of August 
that three men who had enlisted in London on 
the same day, were leaving altogether twenty-six 
persons to be supported by the State. Not only, 



186 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

then for a moral reason should compulsory service, 
if established, be enforced first of all on bachelors. 
The voluntary system has other defects still more 
injurious to the successful conduct of the war. 
Not only is the number of recruits smaller than 
it might be, but who can foretell what this number 
will be to-morrow, or six months hence? Impos- 
sible to estimate and prepare the necessary equip- 
ment and the adequate lists of instructors and 
officers : this became clear in the first months of 
the war. Such was then the sudden rush of volun- 
teers, that for lack of enough buildings, uniforms, 
guns, and instructors many had to be refused. 
The men were discouraged; the idea spread that 
no more men were wanted, and the next appeal 
met with a poor response; it was necessary to 
resort to new propaganda. Then there was another 
difficulty, leading to another kind of confusion : A 
man would often enlist for a particular corps or a 
particular service only. A chief engineer, priceless 
in the workshop, would insist on going to the firing 
line; an unskilled mechanic would prefer to serve 
at home in a factory. Finally, for lack of the 
numbers of fighting men which conscription would 
give, the State, as the war extends and the need 
of soldiers increases, ends by taking all who offer 
themselves, even boys and weaklings, who quickly 
sink to the hospital and are finally dismissed. Time 
was required to reveal all these defects, some of 
them clearly immoral, of a system which owes all 
its prestige to its appearance of superior morality, 
and the force of tradition. 

The nation, too, was gradually beginning to see 



ADAPTATION 187 

the matter from a different angle. As more and 
more men enlisted, as hundreds of thousands be- 
came millions, the country's centre of gravity and 
the focus of public opinion shifted. Long before 
the end of 1915 they were no longer in a civilian 
population, which had parted with nothing of its 
liberty, that was menaced by conscription. They 
were in that part of the people which had offered 
itself for national service; in those legions of 
soldiers who had staked their lives, in all those 
families which had resigned themselves to the 
sacrifice of their sons. For all such, and for the 
ideal which inspires them, conscription would act, 
bringing reinforcement to those true Englishmen 
who had freely risen to defend the Empire, help- 
ing them to victory. Among all who have sub- 
mitted to military discipline, or seen their sons 
or brothers submit to it, the opinion — an opinion 
more or less clearly expressed, but growing stronger 
every day — is that individualism and liberty are 
ideas valid only in times of peace and safety; 
they feel that in the face of the enemy, every 
man belongs to that England which is gathering 
herself together for the fight; that, in fine, mili- 
tary service is due for defence of king and 
country, that king and country have the right to 
demand it — a right not only moral, but legal and 
constitutional, as, towards the end of the year a 
score of pamphlets, articles and speeches of the 
conscriptionists have undertaken to show. 

For at last an attack is being made on the root 
argument of their opponents, on that argument 
which, in this land of tradition, seemed unassailable. 



188 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

and has been raised by the pure democrats, the 
advocates of the new sociaHstic idea — a paradox 
pecuHarly EngHsh — into a dogma of their creed. 
No, say the conscriptionists, the authority of pre- 
cedent, to which you appeal, is not on your side, 
but against you. Compulsory service has been 
a principle of the Constitution from time im- 
memorial ! Thereupon the discussion plunges into 
the dusty and sacred vaults of the remote past. 
Charters, Saxon and Norman chronicles, forgotten 
texts from the Statute Book are unearthed to 
prove King George the Fifth's ancient and im- 
prescriptible right to the military service of all 
his male subjects. Right back they go to the 
times of ^Ifric and Harold, to the landfyrd, or 
county levies summoned by the Witenagemot, 
to the Assize of Arms of 1181, to the posse comi- 
tatus of Henry II, to the trained bands or militia 
of James I, to the Statutes of the Restoration (13 
and 14 Car. II) which transferred from the Sheriff 
to the Crown the right of calling out this militia — 
to that other act of Parliament which, under 
Victoria, in 1865 (34 and 35 Vict. cap. 86) sus- 
pended this right for one year only, a suspension 
automatically repeated every year, so that, though 
the right has never been acted on since Waterloo, 
it still remains legally intact. ^ The occult and 
latent manner of its survival makes it only the 
more sacred, sacred as some inscription in runic 

^ " Compulsory Service as a Principle of the Constitution," 
Henry Blake in the Nineteenth Century, October 1915. Numerous 
letters in the papers appealed to historic arguments. In the 
Battle of Waterloo county militia,, raised by tirage au sort, took 
part. 



ADAPTATION 189 

letters, on the tomb of a Saxon king, in the crypt 
of Westminster; Hke those almost obliterated 
words, it is linked with the dim and hidden 
foundations of an august, mysterious structure, 
overflowing with memories and the magic of the 
past — the Constitution of England. 

Such is the historic right of the monarch to 
summon the free men of his counties to the defence 
of England. How moving is the imperious brevity 
of this appeal, how serious and fine — say the sup- 
porters of compulsion — compared with the noisy, 
gaudy methods of recruiting, the Barnum posters 
and clap-trap, the endless hubbub of voices that 
assail, entreat, cajole mothers, sweethearts and 
wives ! For to that the English voluntary system 
has finally degenerated, this is the impression it 
produces on worn-out imaginations, after fifteen 
months of propaganda, speeches, and advertising : 
a never-ending agitation and babble, ruinous to 
English dignity in the eyes of foreigners. Irregular 
in its effects, ill-adapted to the necessities of organ- 
isation and prevision, the voluntary system is 
finally attacked as the reverse of a system ; more- 
over — so they say — all voluntary element has now 
disappeared from it. No doubt, in the early 
months, and we may say throughout the whole of 
the first year of the war, it was private reflection, 
the silent and personal impulse to duty, which 
decided the men to enrol themselves. The great 
majority of the army, two or three million, en- 
listed thus. Such a thing had never been seen and 
would not have been thought possible : it is one 
of the finest collective acts of a nation on record. 



190 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

But all the same, this great tale of the conscien- 
tious came to an end at last, and then those who 
had shirked the recruiting office came more and 
more to be looked on as an inferior class, with 
whom one might take liberties. How much was 
now left to them of that private and guarded 
domain of freedom and conscience which no one 
is supposed to enter? Recruiting agents, volun- 
teer canvassers^ clergymen, neighbours and their 
wives, local notabilities — a clamorous throng pours 
its invasions into this desecrated retreat, urging, 
forcing the shirker to take the pledge, no longer 
content with taking what once would have seemed 
the liberty of putting a question on such a private 
matter, or daring to offer unsolicited advice. In- 
timidation, well-nigh compulsion, are now used; 
humiliating and unjustifiable, exerted as they are 
by a casual stranger, and not by the State. Life 
has become unbearable to the man who still takes 
the word " voluntary " in its literal sense, and still 
fancies he has the right to refuse. The rector or 
squire of his village asks the reason of his absten- 
tion, his employer threatens to dismiss him, his 
sweetheart to throw him over, his lady-friends cut 
him, others, whom he has never seen, present him 
in the street with that English symbol of cowardice 
— a white feather. What now of the sacred prin- 
ciple, in whose name, for all its illogical injustice, 
the country refused to change a system which kept 
it in a state of military inferiority ? Only a word 
is left, and the most clear-sighted and sincere of the 
Radicals, those staunch enemies of conscription, 
perceive this plainly enough, and end either in 



ADAPTATION 191 

supporting, or at least tolerating, the idea of com- 
pulsory service — talking no longer of principle but 
of expediency, and accepting beforehand what the 
Government, the only competent judge of the 
necessity, decides. ''^ If it must he, it must.^^ 

But, for the masses, never given to analysis, 
a word, even when it no longer corresponds to 
reality, may remain all-powerful — a stimulus to 
feeling and to action, like some dogma, which 
can inspire fanaticism, even when it means nothing 
to the brain. This essential power of words and 
signs, and in a more general sense, of appearances 
and forms, even after the whole substance of their 
contents has vanished or changed, the English 
have always intuitively and dumbly understood. 
Instinctively they respect this power; more, they 
know how to turn it to account, with that innate 
and deep -lying sense of life and its irrational 
processes which makes them so indifferent to logic. 
Hence some of the most striking and familiar pecu- 
liarities of England, of her manners and her Con- 
stitution. Take, for instance, her practically re- 
publican form of government, her democratic 
institutions, and yet the almost religious worship 
of the king, the maintenance round his name and 
person of a mediaeval system of formulas, cere- 
monies and institutions, such as the presence of 
that magic symbol, the royal mace, in the house 
of an all-powerful Parliament. Or, again, the fact 
that the Anglican Church, which insists on styling 
itself the Holy Catholic Church, is quite determined 
to remain Anglican. Or yet again, see how the 
Broad Church has introduced into the jealously 



192 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

preserved Christian rites and words, quite new 
meanings — agnostic, rationalist, even pantheistic. 
This people always wants its new wine in the 
old bottles, and with the old labels. Examples 
are innumerable : sufficient to recall here how 
ancient, deep-rooted and peculiar to England is 
this tendency. 

This national trait it is which affords the means 
of solving, in true English fashion, what would 
seem, a ^priori, an insoluble problem : how to 
impose military service on men who regard it as 
the most humiliating slavery, and who are not to 
be coerced. A good enough working solution — 
the English do not insist on theoretical precision 
— was found by Lord Derby, who was forthwith 
commissioned to put it into application. It was 
voluntary compulsory service. What does the Eng- 
lish mind care about the absurdity of such a con- 
ception if it works, as they say, if it gives practical 
results? Voluntary enlistment, so called, had in 
fact already become almost compulsory through 
the pressure of opinion, through the application 
of well-nigh irresistible influences to all who hesi- 
tated or refused. It only remained for the State, 
following the lead of the general public, to assume 
over the shirkers certain final rights and powers 
unrecognised by any statute of the written Constitu- 
tion, even contrary to the spirit of the unwritten 
Constitution. Observe that great care was taken not 
to assert these rights, and provoke the defenders 
of ancient liberties and traditions by proclaiming 
a new principle : the English, when aiming at 



ADAPTATION 193 

practical ends, instinctively feel the danger and 
futility of exciting passions by setting up a new 
principle against an old. It is by a silent and 
gradual pressure that the State, in its want of 
soldiers, attempts to extend its powers, assuming 
no direct responsibility, taking care not to commit 
itself, simply authorising provisionally a certain 
private citizen, Lord Derby, until then quite un- 
connected with the Government, to exploit a certain 
private idea of his own, a patent system of which 
he is the inventor. As a rule, in England, the man 
who directs a public movement, the man in charge 
really does direct it, choosing in all freedom his 
ways and means, taking all initiative and responsi- 
bility; so Lord Derby, now Director of Recruit- 
ing, personally applies his system, making public 
speeches — the other day he was addressing the 
Stock Exchange (November 24) — writing public 
letters to the papers, and private letters to every 
man who is expected to enlist, answering all the 
questions that turn up, deciding everything, in- 
venting methods, superintending the new and 
very complex organisation, the detailed applica- 
tion of which he delegates to voluntary local 
committees.^ 

^ Many other examples of the same method could be quoted. 
The English do not speak of the cenBOTship, but of the censor. 
In time of peace, when the Defence of the Realm Act is not in 
existence, the censor is an official who, with the help of a few 
secretaries, passes final judgment on the morality of plays, and 
decides what omissions must be made. In the same way at 
boxing and football matches, which are followed by a large public 
with passionate interest, and on which thousands of pounds are 
often staked, there is but a single referee (in such cases it has 
been found necessary in France to divide the responsibility). 
O 



194 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

The starting point of the new system was the 
National Register, drawn up in July, the chief 
object of which had been to prepare State control 
over the individual, by instilling into his mind 
the idea that the community has a right to the 
service of each of its members and that such service 
may be exacted. From this huge catalogue the 
local committees extracted the names and addresses 
of all those of military age, and transcribed them 
in special lists {pink forms). They form a class 
apart; the State has not seized them, but the 
State is watching them, and its attitude clearly 
reveals its purpose. Still, the class of men who 
are wanted is not yet sufficiently defined. For 
the fact is generally known that the Government 
does not want to stop all the manufactures of the 
country; it wishes England to go on as long as 
possible producing and exporting the goods which 
will enable her to meet her financial obligations — 
greater than those of the other belligerents and 
further increased by loans to her Allies. It is, 
therefore, easy for a man who does not want to 
enter the army to persuade himself that he is 
supporting, more or less directly, one of these 
indispensable industries. So Lord Derby adopts 

Lastly, the solitary and supreme authority of the judge in 
England is well known. 

One may wonder that in a free country such power should 
be granted to single individuals ; but the fact can be explained 
by general habits of mind which may be traced to a commercial 
and puritan origin. It saves time and money to commit the 
direction of, and the responsibility for, any business, to a single 
well chosen and reliable man. Also the authority of the referee, 
the censor, or the judge is accepted because the}'' embody the 
idea of law which the instinct of order perceives to be necessary. 



ADAPTATION 195 

the plan of marking by a star placed against their 
names those who are more useful in their offices 
or workshops than at the war, the result, of course, 
being that the others feel themselves more clearly 
pointed at than ever. He goes further by pro- 
viding with an armlet all those who have passed 
through the recruiting office, as a visible sign of 
their accomplished duty, and a protection against 
public censure — which is thereby drawn down on 
those who do not wear an armlet. More signifi- 
cant still — for here the compulsory nature of the 
system first clearly shows itself — special courts are 
created to decide without appeal who are entitled 
to be " starred " ; and often masters are seen appeal- 
ing for permission to keep a clerk or workman on 
the plea that he cannot be spared. Thus, for every 
Englishman from eighteen to forty. Nelson's order, 
so often quoted, takes on an ever more imperious 
meaning. It is no longer : " England expects that 
every man will do his duty," but England re- 
quests every man to do his duty; and the sum- 
mons is soon so strongly expressed, so insistently 
repeated, that no one any longer feels free to neg- 
lect it, and a stronger will is required to stand 
back than to enlist. Hitherto the Government had 
left everything to the propagandist societies and 
committees; now it speaks, urges, threatens, fore- 
shadowing drastic action, and the peculiar tone 
of its language shows clearly what sort of men 
it is addressing — the so-called shirkers and slackers, 
who, now that all brave men have enlisted, are 
almost looked upon as defaulters. " If you are 
not ready to march," says Lord Kitchener in 



196 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

very plain words, " until you are made to, where 
is the merit of that? where is the patriotism? 
Are you going to wait to do your duty until you 
are fetched ? " What a difference between such 
language, which almost threatens, and the simple, 
quiet words which, last May, placed without com- 
ment the need before the country, leaving each 
man to judge and decide for himself ! 

Almost at once, to increase the pressure, the de- 
mand becomes more personal, not in the figurative 
fashion of posters and speeches, which aimed at 
giving each man the feeling that he was being per- 
sonally addressed, but actually, unceremoniously 
calling him by his own name, hunting him up at 
home, pursuing and worrying him in his private 
life. First of all comes a private letter signed by 
Lord Derby, delivered at the man's house, to 
impress on him a rigid, simple conception of duty, 
and dispel beforehand all illusory excuse by obliging 
him to put to himself this catechism : " Am I 
doing all I can for my country ? Would the reason 
which I am giving for abstention be considered 
valid in a country where there is universal ser- 
vice ? " After this comes an attempt to force a 
decision by notifying the date after which choice 
will no longer rest with him ; for though enlistment 
is still supposed to be voluntary, he is warned that 
if he does not enlist he will at a very early date 
" be fetched." Whereupon the door bell rings, and 
the canvasser enters, sent by the local voluntary 
Recruiting Committee. Like the members of the 
committee itself, these visitors are usually local 
notabilities, above military age : municipal coun- 



ADAPTATION 197 

cillors, clergymen, dissenting ministers, merchants, 
manufacturers, presidents and secretaries of trade 
unions, workmen, election agents of both parties, 
officials of political and private societies — and each 
makes a point of calling on those men whom he 
knows more or less closely, and who are supposed 
to be open to the visitor's influence, for the whole 
process is direct, living and human. If the man 
is not at home, the orders are to keep on coming 
until he is found, to tackle him by asking and dis- 
cussing the reasons of his resistance, by talking to 
him of allowances and pensions, after which, if 
the result is negative, a fresh start is to be made, 
this time indirectly, by trying to put pressure 
upon him through his family, his friends, or his 
employer. This employer is sometimes the head of 
a government department. In that case he has not 
waited to act. The French newspapers published 
the letter, courteous but stiff, of scarcely disguised 
sternness, and very personal in its tone, which the 
Postmaster General addressed to each member of 
his staff, warning him that unless he enlisted, he 
could no longer rely on keeping his situation.^ 

1 Here is this very significant document : " Your name has 
been given me as that of a man of military age, with whose 
services the department could dispense for the benefit of the 
army. If you are physically capable of bearing arms you should 
enlist. The members of the regular staff of my department who 
have answered the appeal to the nation must not see their places 
occupied by others, as fit as themselves, to serve the country. 
I cannot, therefore, guarantee you your situation in my depart- 
ment. The necessity of new recruits is imperious. Many of 
you are saying : ' I will wait until the Government says it wants 
me ; and then I will go.^ In the name of the Government I tell 
you now that you are wanted and I ask you to go to the front ** 
(November 13th), 



198 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

Finally, a list is drawn up of the decidedly in- 
tractable, which looks very much like a roll of 
dishonour and those who base their refusal on 
religious reasons, as in Russia the Doukhobors, 
are in a truly pitiable position.^ In the presence 
of such proceedings, one can understand the ex- 
clamation of a speaker at a meeting of the No- 
Conscription Fellowship. " Better," he cried, 
" legal compulsion ! " — to which, of course, an 
Englishman can always, if it be a question of de- 
fending his conscience, honourably offer passive 
resistance. Yes, the heavy hand of the policeman, 
prison itself where a conscientious objector can 
assume — like those in old times who refused to pay 
ship money — the halo of sacrifice and almost of 
martyrdom, are better than this continual, name- 
less persecution, which, whilst pretending to respect 
your liberty, tries to damage your character. Be- 
sides, the man feels that, in fact, he is already no 
longer free ; he has but the choice between an act 
which they still deign to call voluntary, and an 
act which will be exacted from him in a few months, 
or weeks, by the law, and in case of refusal, by the 
police. At the end of November, the State feels so 
sure of its right to the person of every fit man for 
the defence of the country — a right, mark you, not 
yet put forward by statute, and is so certain of 
public opinion, that it takes that right tacitly for 
granted, at least in the case of the unmarried men, 
by suddenly forbidding them to leave the country. 

^ The Archbishop of Canterbury asked that the clergy of his 
denomination should not be included in this list, and his request 
was granted^ 



ADAPTATION 199 

Till that moment appearances had been preserved, 
and it could still be said that only a voluntary 
act had been requested with greater and greater 
urgency. Theoretically, at all events, " liberty of 
the subject " was still intact. But when police- 
men prevent Englishmen from boarding a steamer 
bound for a foreign port, conscription or no, a new 
principle is being applied — a new epoch begins in 
the history of this nation. 

That last measure affected only the unmarried 
men. The fact is that, by these essentially English 
methods which respected familiar forms and for- 
mulas, whilst emptying them of their ancient con- 
tents in order to fill them cautiously with an 
opposite meaning, solutions were being arrived at, 
no less peculiarly English — solutions, that is, frag- 
mentary, special to the case, and in the nature of 
a compromise — solutions in which the new principle 
is present, but hardly expressed, laying no claim 
to absolute truth, and thus avoiding challenge to 
the defenders of the old principle. Conscription — 
perhaps ; but first only for this limited class ; or, 
later on, indirect compulsion, through the inter- 
vention of the local authorities, such as requisition 
of a certain number of soldiers from every town 
and country, on the supposed authority of obsolete 
laws suddenly unearthed; or, finally, in Ireland, 
where opposition is known to be pretty general, 
conscription for one province only, Ulster, for 
instance, of English blood and Protestant faith, 
whose good example the Nationalist and Catholic 
counties will be sure to follow. Whatever the final 



200 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

solution, every means has now been taken to cover 
up the tracks of the coming revolution. It is now 
well on the way ; but if Lord Derby's effort fails, 
the enacting of conscription will only sanction an 
already established order, and translate into a legal 
formula an acquired habit. But that formula itself 
will be avoided as long as ever it can be. For 
instinctively England hides her revolutionary 
changes under the forms of evolution.^ 



Of all such changes, none in all her history was 
ever so rapidly completed. It may have seemed 
slow to those who follow things from the outside, 
who only see the urgency, the necessity for imme- 
diate reform in order to meet the danger efficiently. 
But if we consider the force of the long-estab- 
lished tendencies which had to be overcome — 
immemorial habits based on a boasted national 
principle, and rooted in religion — if we remember 
the insularity of the English, the habitual fixity 
of form and tendency, as of a very old breed that 
has lived safely for ages in its closed and isolated 
environment — if we call to mind also the resistant 
powers of self-interest and prejudice, over which an 

^ Lord Derby's system was exactly a middle course between 
free enlistment and conscription. It was, in the literal sense 
of the words, voluntary conscription. By submitting to it, 
men place themselves in the same position as the young French- 
man who has to serve. They are at the disposal of the military 
authorities, divided into groups, which are called up, just like 
our classes in France, according to the need of the moment. 



ADAPTATION 201 

invisible danger had to prevail in order to rouse 
a people but little given to emotion and naturally 
impervious to everything but experience ; if, I say, 
we realise all this, then we can, on the contrary, 
but marvel that changes so far-reaching, so op- 
posed to the new social and political developments 
in which England was engaged, could have taken 
place in the course of a few months. 

And we wonder still more, when we see by 
what methods — methods of liberty — such a change, 
directed against liberty, was achieved. It has 
come, that change, from the never-ceasing action 
of private initiative, from the harmonious co-opera- 
tion of myriads of people. For instance, to form, 
sustain, and enlarge the stream which is constantly 
increasing the size of the army ; to attract into it 
in continuous flood the necessary millions of sepa- 
rate drops; to seek out and drive on those who 
have resisted all earlier appeals and entreaties — to 
do all this the number of individuals and private 
societies who have kept on working for eighteen 
months, from one end of the country to the other, 
can scarcely be realised. 

In this war, in which every nation reveals her 
innermost self, this is the specially English feature : 
everything springs from the principle of self-govern- 
ment — even the effort of those who aim at doing 
away with self-government by subjecting every 
Englishman to the authorities who are carrying 
on the war. Since August 4th, 1914, England 
has been, practically and without intermission, 
in the state that she gets into periodically, before 
her General Elections. Speeches, discussions, pro- 



202 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

cessions, meetings, advertisements of every kind, 
unceasing activity on the part of citizens who are 
not, as in other countries, political specialists or 
agents of a State department engaged in " working " 
elections, but purely and simply the citizens, the 
men and women of England, moved by the ideas 
that have taken hold of them — ideas expressed 
by each man in the street who jumps on a chair in 
a public square to address the crowd, no less than 
by a Cabinet Minister who, but yesterday, was 
touring England to convert refractory workmen. 
The issue is England herself — as Mr. Lloyd George 
said to the workmen and employers at Manchester, 
that England which is the property of every Eng- 
lishman, in the government, the danger and safety 
of which, every Englishman is personally interested. 
In order to speed up the recruiting movement all 
over the country, Lord Derby follows the same 
methods as Mr. Lloyd George pursued when he 
had to increase the production of munitions. He 
consults with the Parliamentary and Labour Re- 
cruiting Committees, brings forward a scheme of 
organisation with local committees, canvassers, 
inspectors, town and district tribunals, central 
courts of appeal. Along these general lines, every- 
thing spontaneously arranges, co-ordinates itself, 
and gets into action, evolved from the very depths 
of the nation, representing freely and completely all 
her various elements : Radicals and Conservatives, 
gentlemen and small shopkeepers, great manu- 
facturers and plain working men. Under Lord 
Derby, Director- General of Recruiting, there are, 
of course, local directors, but their authority, like 



ADAPTATION 203 

his, is purely moral. Everything is free and volun- 
tary, everything is spontaneous like life itself. From 
the main recruiting committees sub-committees will 
sprout — ^the normal mode of growth for societies, 
clubs, leagues, unions, chapels, groups and bodies 
innumerable — which spread their ramifications over 
the whole country and gradually develop according 
to the successive impulses that emerge from and 
modify the original idea. This is the instinctive and 
peculiar activity of the Englishman, who does not feel 
really alive unless he is developing in this fashion ; 
this it is which has for so long made England the 
classic country of free association. To undertake 
by oneself or in co-operation with others what is 
desired or needed, without direction from some 
higher, public, anonymous power, this is what an 
Englishman calls liberty — his special liberty as an 
Englishman. Such spontaneous activity, the main 
social force of the country, the Government knows 
how to stimulate and make use of for national pur- 
poses. To this nation — or, to be more accurate, to 
each of its individuals, for to each the words are 
spoken, and not to the community as a whole — ^the 
Government, on the day after the entry of Bulgaria 
into the war, addressed the following warning : 
" The military authorities will not hold themselves 
responsible for the issue of the war if the country 
does not provide them with another million men." 
It sounds rather like the call from a board of direc- 
tors to their shareholders for a fresh supply of capi- 
tal. Then comes the discussion as to ways, means 
and details : public debates in which the matter is 
considered and reconsidered in broad daylight, 



204 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

constant exchange of views between the Govern- 
ment and the people, between some Minister and 
some association or union wishing to obtain a 
clear idea of the difficulties. Not a week but 
brings a conference between Mr. Lloyd George 
and the representatives of some Trade Union. 
On July 17th a deputation of ladies (probably 
former suffragettes), led by Mrs. Pankhurst, came 
to ask the enlistment of women as war workers. 
He expressed approval, offered to organise tech- 
nical instruction for working women, and, speaking 
generally of the munition difficulty, told them 
that the chief obstacle to the production of shells 
on the necessary scale was the lack of machine 
tools, lathes and gauges, that he had just had a 
meeting with all the great manufacturers, and 
that such and such establishments were about to 
be placed under State control; in short, he ac- 
quainted them with his difficulties, experiments 
and plans. All these particulars were published in 
the evening papers. The same thing takes place 
every day : the Government gives information, 
stimulates and co-ordinates. It is for the country 
to will and give the collective effort whose main- 
spring is to be found in the free conscience of 
each individual citizen. 

Individualism, freedom, conscience, we have 
often used these words : when speaking of this 
country one cannot avoid their constant recur- 
rence. If it were possible to define the peculiar 
shades of meaning, the special and mutual rela- 
tions of the ideas they express when applied to 



ADAPTATION 205 

the English, one would come very near the moral 
equation of England. To-day much more than 
formerly, one must take into account the omnipo- 
tence of a public opinion, quick to rise, spread, and 
rule, in a society which the progress of mechanical 
science tends to bind ever more closely together — 
a public opinion which represents the average spon- 
taneous adjustment of individual minds, and not 
only sways the powers that be, but almost tyran- 
nically compels to conformity each theoretically 
free and inviolable soul. We have already seen 
something of the conflict between the two prin- 
ciples : one, English, ancient, and mainly of 
religious origin, that throws the individual on to 
his own self and resources ; the other, modern, that 
subjects him to the impulses and suggestions of his 
new town environment. The special feature of 
England is, that in that country both these prin- 
ciples are so strong. The whole story of the 
movement which gave England her new armies — 
from the first enthusiasm of the genuine volunteers, 
down to Lord Derby's experiment, down to the 
first Conscription Bill — has shown us the clash and 
intermingling thereof. 

December 1915.^ 

^ Note on the Law of Conscription, see Appendix E. 



TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 

Thus, by methods as contrary to those of 
Germany as the minds and training of the two 
countries are different, the English effort at adap- 
tation goes forward. To conceive its greatness, we 
must bear in mind the special circumstances of this 
nation, its secular security, its lack of experience 
for a great modern war, its deep-rooted dislike of 
innovation, its situation at the beginning of the 
struggle, with a military force inferior to that of 
a small Continental State. Only so can one see 
that the effort could develop but gradually, as 
the sensation of danger and attack slowly sank 
into the depths of the country's mind, and the 
idea of the necessary adjustment was at last con- 
ceived. It is not enough to present to this people 
such an idea from without : the English cannot 
be stirred or diverted from their habits by appeal 
to the intellect. Pure ideas have no effect on the 
English mind, which remains indifferent to their 
logic. That mind, evolved in isolation, cut off 
from foreign influences, has grown from nothing 
but its own past — a very long past, during which 
it has crystallised and become imbued with all 
those peculiarities which make an Englishman so 
different from every Continental. He has long 

206 



TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 207 

passed the age when change is possible; he has 
become the creature of his habits. In a crisis 
which necessitates adaptation to a sudden change 
of circumstance, he will seek for means of safety, 
not in those ideal and rational methods, logically 
adequate to the problem, open to minds of less 
arrested growth, but in his habits and experience. 

Yet, however original England's answer to the 
problem, however great the part played by English 
temperament, that answer can after all be nothing 
but a more or less picturesque variant of the solu- 
tion that logic demands. For, a priori, there is but 
one answer. After all, and in spite of all, to oppose 
efficiently the accuracy, the inhuman regularity, of 
a machine, one must change oneself into a machine 
— a machine of the same type as that which Ger- 
many has become in the hands of her Prussian 
masters precisely because she never was a naturally 
evolved and truly organic being. Now for England 
whose structure is not, like that of the enemy, 
the creation of will guided by logic, but a slowly 
and spontaneously evolved product of life : for 
England, whose general activities, born of the 
free competition of countless private enterprises, 
run chiefly on the lines of instinct and tradition, 
such a transformation is of all the most difficult. 
The citizens of a country in which the State 
has never directed anything must now be put 
under the control of that State; a people whose 
political, moral and religious principle has been 
for centuries self-government, must be subjected to 
a central authority, brought into the rigid frame- 
work of a military hierarchy. And all this must 



208 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

be done, not by one of those long processes of evo- 
lution in the course of which an organic type may 
be completely changed, but in a few months, under 
pain of national death or degradation. 

England has done it, is doing it, by turning to 
account the very principle which seemed likely to 
make it impossible. Self-Government : that is to 
say, habitual self-control, power to master one's 
impulses and one's appetites, in short, character, 
the outcome of three centuries of puritan culture 
and a system of education which has had for its 
main object the training of the will — character and 
the tradition of voluntary discipline. That is the 
living product of life, the long-developed habit, the 
peculiar and basic trait, which England is turning 
to account in order to adapt herself to her new 
circumstances, when it seemed that her very faith- 
fulness to her own past would prevent her. Her 
self -discipline will take the place of laws prescribed, 
the bidding of her conscience serve for commands 
from without ; the machine shall not be manufac- 
tured, but spring together from her inner impulses. 
For all this, one thing is necessary : the idea must 
rise and spread, rousing each individual will and 
moving it to co-operate with others. Because 
this has been for centuries the necessary condition 
of all things in their country, the English well know 
how to hasten such a process. But swift though 
the movement be, it cannot be instantaneous. 

The organic, we have said, may be killed by 
the mechanical, if the attack be so sudden that 
there is no time to develop from within the means 
of defence. Germany, who through France was 



TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 209 

aiming at England, came very near dealing her a 
fatal blow. If the march on Paris had succeeded, 
if France had been conquered, in a few years 
Germany, richer by our wealth, established on the 
coast, and mistress of the Continent, would soon 
have outrun any possible extension of the English 
fleet. At the Battle of the Marne, the fate of the 
world hung trembling in the balance; without 
doubt, the British Empire, too, was saved by that 
victory. To both England and France it gave 
time, essential to our ally as to ourselves. We 
had to perfect and bring our machine into working 
order, but she had to set hers up from the founda- 
tion, and lacking all central command, could set 
up nothing if the human material hung back. All 
England, to her very depths, has had to learn and 
understand, and resolve to come forward. The war 
had found her in ignorance and apathy ; she knew 
nothing but herself, she hated nobody; she did 
not even know she had enemies, hardly knew the 
full meaning of that word. Perhaps, if Germany 
had fought her honourably, the great part of her 
people would not have yet quite understood. She 
might not have strained every nerve ; might even 
have been willing to make a place for her opponent 
by her side on sea and land, by some cession of 
her colonial territory. Such proposals had been 
discussed. During the past ten years, those who 
governed and represented England had done their 
best to preserve the peace ; nay, had been inspired 
by purest pacificism. All their political activity 
had been directed towards the ideals of humanity, 
fraternity and justice. Germany's long accumulated 



210 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

hatred and envy burst out with such brutality, 
that England has at last awakened from her dream 
of idealism. That is the fundamental fact : she 
believes once more in the Devil. 

And so, not only has the will arisen to put 
the machine of defence together, but England, 
now warned, will doubtless never suffer those who 
planned and attempted the destruction of her 
Empire to recover the positions they held on the 
planet, and return to the attempt to conquer world 
dominion; — no, their ambition to evict England 
in order to reign alone, has been too manifest. 
An end to big German armaments ! — and if the 
fleet, which lurks at Kiel, remain in existence, and 
in the hands of Germany, then three British keels 
on the stocks for every German keel; and prob- 
ably a decision as soon as possible. Did we not 
learn, in September 1915, that, during the first 
fourteen months of this war, Britain had been able 
to launch fourteen new dreadnoughts? England, 
perplexed when outside her traditions, is well 
within them when dealing with naval matters. 
We recall, too, her patient, almost invisible effort 
against the submarines, which were to bring her 
to her knees — and her silent success. Already 
the superiority of her fleet has inflicted on the 
enemy losses that probably more than counter- 
balance Germany's conquests in Europe — the loss 
of her sea traffic and of her colonies. Such facts 
throw a Hght on " the future of Germany on the 
seas." The check must be fatal to a nation that 
has so rapidly evolved from the agricultural to the 
industrial type, and whose numbers, growing out 



TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 211 

of all proportion to the resources of her soil, must 
command, if they are to live, the markets of the 
world. Against such an enemy as the war has 
revealed Germany to be, the old liberal precept. 
Live and let live, is no longer valid. You can no 
longer allow the growth of a rival who has made 
up his mind to grow at the expense of your own 
life and who has already attempted to carry out 
his murderous intention. 

The English war-machine goes on putting itself 
together, and this is the most formidable of all 
facts for Germany, who is reaching the limit of her 
effort. She is, of course, still capable of causing 
great havoc, but everywhere she shows signs of ex- 
haustion. The human fuel that feeds her machine 
is diminishing at a terrible rate, and its quality is 
getting worse : one can forecast the time when 
it will begin to run short. Meanwhile, England's 
power is only just being organised — in silence : a 
silence more ominous, for any one who knows her, 
than all the German hymns and yells of hatred. 
The fourth million of men is now being raised. No 
doubt Lord Derby's system must have seemed 
queer, ridiculous, ' amateurisch^ to the German pro- 
fessionals. But what do they think of its success ? 
At a moment, when four-fifths of their wounded 
have to go back to the front, and the German 
people are talking of nothing but peace and be- 
lieve themselves at the end of the war — with 
what feelings do they view the five hundred 
thousand fresh volunteers who have enlisted in 
three days, the crowds besieging, in the sixteenth 



212 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

month of the war, the recruiting offices, the rows 
and rows of men waiting until two or three o'clock 
in the morning for their turn to raise their hands 
and take, by fives and tens at a time, the military 
oath? Finally, for these masters of Germany, to 
whom England is gradually revealing herself, of 
what omen is the new conscription law? Two 
thousand five hundred factories are preparing, said 
Lord Kitchener, munitions for six million men in 
the spring ; the State is spending five million pounds 
every day on the war, raising much of it by taxa- 
tion. England's power is being manifested indeed 
— a power that we had felt latent and diffused in 
town and country, that is being organised day by 
day into a thorough and strictly ordered fighting 
force. 

And constant efforts are being made to concen- 
trate this force with a view to greater efficiency, 
to bring it under the control of a few competent, 
strong men 'who can ensure its swift employ- 
ment. The Coalition Government, which exists 
only for the conduct of the war, is composed of 
twenty-two members. Too many ! The English 
believe — ^not a new idea for a people of merchants 
and manufacturers — ^that no business can be pro- 
perly conducted with a large board of directors; 
that, as we have seen in the case of Lord 
Derby's scheme, the proper condition of success is 
to have a small number of chiefs free to decide 
and responsible for their decisions. For the 
management of the war, a Cabinet of twenty-two 
political men reminds one too much of a de- 
bating club where discussion never ends in action. 



TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 213 

Its numbers have not yet been reduced as the 
Conservatives advocate. But a committee of five 
Ministers, deaUng specially with the war, has been 
formed as a preliminary, perhaps, to the more 
complete reform which some desire and which 
would place two or three energetic men at the 
head of things : the idea of a Dictator has even 
been mooted. At the same time, in order to 
advise on technical operations, the General Army 
Staff, which has long been but a memory, has 
been re-established at the War Office, where it 
acts in collaboration with the naval experts. No 
more improvisations, no more freaks such as those 
with which Mr. Winston Churchill has been so 
much reproached : the happy-go-lucky system is 
now out of favour; the old faith in charice has 
gone. Method, organisation, foresight, swift and 
co-ordinated action, are now the order of the day, 
not only at the top of the ladder but through- 
out the administration. The Englishman has con- 
scientiously compared himself in military matters 
with the German, whom he despises : he has come 
to the conclusion that the German wages war like 
a professional, and that he himself has too long 
played the part of an amateur. 

Most important of all is the fact that this 
criticism, repeated every day by journals and 
magazines, does not limit itself to matters military. 
It is being applied to everything, being directed 
against all those national methods of action and 
thought which hitherto have made this people so 
different from all others, but which in this crisis 
are discovered to be causes of practical inferiority. 



214 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

The whole social system of England is now ques- 
tioned : the principle of individualism, the faith 
in the powers of laisser faire and the mutual 
self-adjustment of things by spontaneous develop- 
ment, the worship of precedent and tradition. 
New methods of education are being considered 
which will not sacrifice intellectual culture, nor 
the equipment of the mind to the aristocratic and 
puritan ideals of physical perfection, of character 
and conduct. A new type of Englishman is 
being called for — the man of disciplined intellect, 
more scientific and specialised, better armed, in 
short, for life struggle between the nations. This 
is the sort of change, a real transmutation of 
values, which is likely to take place. It had 
already been anticipated before the war, for 
which Mr. Wells had not waited when he pro- 
claimed this ideal; attentive students of English 
life and society had noticed that the mind and 
the appearance of the average Englishman were 
becoming less insular. The change cannot but be 
hastened by the war, which drills millions of 
young men into military habits and ideas, and 
by universal service — a sure solvent of the old caste 
prejudices. As a whole, the result will be the 
substitution of rational thought for instinct, of 
conscious and systematic activities for the spon- 
taneous processes of vital evolution. 

The change can surely not be limited to the in- 
dividual; the nation will organise herself morally 
and politically, concentrating and intensifying her 
consciousness of self — developing, one may say, a 
British form of nationalism. In sheer self-defence, 



TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 215 

the State will, at least for a time, evolve, like the 
individual, in the direction of what Herbert Spencer 
called the " military type " ; and it is to be feared 
that the new yearning for discipline and central 
authority will be satisfied at the expense of the 
old principles of liberalism. Already one of these 
— ^the least to be regretted — seems condemned : 
England will no longer leave her markets open to 
the invasions of her rival. Protective barriers, 
diminishing in height as they are directed against 
enemy, neutral or Ally, are being contemplated. 
This will be the end of that system which, by 
reason of the start she had in the industrial race 
between the nations, England was able to establish 
half a century ago, and which she has strangely 
persisted in maintaining at a time when every other 
nation surrounds herself with fences, and some- 
times forges weapons of attack for economic war. 
The Empire, whose unity has been asserted by the 
enthusiastic loyalty of all its peoples, by the heroic 
and spontaneous sacrifice of so many men, will 
surely become more closely bound together. It is 
proposed to make it an isolated whole by a system 
of tariffs such as Mr. Joseph Chamberlain advocated 
after the Boer War : nay, to unite it into a political 
federation, with an Imperial Parliament in which 
all the Colonies and Dominions would be repre- 
sented. After sharing so spontaneously in the 
effort of the Mother Country, after the free sacri- 
fice of their own blood (never will the Canadians 
of Ypres and the men of Anzac be forgotten), these 
new nations form with her henceforth but one 
people and must decide their future together. To 



216 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

become more individual, and yet at the same time 
to conform to a general type, is characteristic now- 
adays of all human communities. England will 
lose a great deal of all that made for her intense 
colour and the unique figure she presented to the 
world. All her peculiar forms and aspects which 
the process of life had gradually evolved and ac- 
cumulated in the course of a long history will the 
more quickly vanish and fade in the universal 
grey of the rational. All allowances made, her 
evolution may be compared to that of Japan, and 
will be due to the same inevitable law — the law 
which commands adjustment to the changes of the 
outer world, with no alternative but decay and 
death. 

All the same, organic and primitive character- 
istics still persist, will perhaps always persist under 
the new forms, and Germany was blind when she 
invented that most fatal of all her psychological 
mistakes : her theory of English decadence. It 
may perhaps be said that England, having grown 
rich, had become less industrious in business, that 
she was too much inclined to rely on her habits 
and her delusive position of security. But from 
decadence the English are much further removed 
than the Germans, if it be only for the fact that 
their culture is much more ethical and less intel- 
lectual, tending always to create those strong asso- 
ciations of feeling, belief and will which constitute 
character and make for moral staying power. In 
the gentry and the upper middle class especially, 
the education of the youth, carried on for the most 
part in the open air, seems to be directed to the 



TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 217 

one object of securing for life moral and nervous 
strength and balance. More than any other, in- 
deed, this people has preserved the sense and 
the religion of moral and physical health. This it 
shows in its contempt for emotion (which it con- 
demns as morbid), in its respect for its own tra- 
ditions, and in its secret delight in effort. What 
are the very games of its youth but a long train- 
ing in self-control ? Such characteristics, and even 
those others most open to criticism — subserviency 
to custom, imperviousness to foreign influence and 
suggestion, and even a certain stolidity of feeling 
and intellect — such characteristics are psychologi- 
cally the very negation of degeneracy. 

Bat beyond all their specific traits is their old 
dumb ingrained determination, in any fight that 
affects their self-respect, not to be beaten; the 
dogged will — more silent as it is roused — to fight 
on with clenched teeth to a victorious finish in 
spite of all blows and all rebuffs ; the stubborn, mute 
refusal to recognise a master. This pride is latent, 
generally not conscious of itself. But it is basic, 
and other nations have never mistaken it. It is at 
the root of several features which the foreigner 
looks upon as peculiarly English, and above all, 
of the Englishman's deliberate reticence and im- 
passivity. Doubtless, such discipline is founded 
on ethical and social principle, and signifies the 
deliberate idea to keep one's balance and self- 
control, the refusal to yield to, and to spread, waves 
of emotion. But at the same time an Englishman 
will not confess that he is up against anything like 
a big proposition, and if an effort must be made. 



218 BRITAIN AND THE WAR 

the main effort is to conceal that effort. And the 
contradiction is but apparent when, in face of 
danger, they speak out the truth, confess and 
clearly proclaim the peril; for this is only done 
when, as in the present circumstances, the threat 
is to the community, and it has become necessary 
to spread the idea of danger among all. Their 
pessimism is but external and expresses the inner 
optimism of a secret conviction ; they speak aloud 
of German strength and English inefficiency, be- 
cause at heart they have no doubt of the English 
will — a will which they feel nothing can unnerve. 
Precisely this same idea we have already detected 
in the muddling'through method : remissness, lack 
of methodical preparation for an effort, because 
whatever may happen, an Englishman at bottom 
relies on himself, on the power he feels within him 
of holding out and ever beginning afresh. 

For the two observers who have probably pene- 
trated more deeply than any other into the soul of 
this people, for both Mr. Kipling and Mr. Gals- 
worthy, this is the bed-rock of the national soul. 
And therein lies one of the great factors of the 
future — truly formidable for those who thought 
to master a degenerate England by fears of Zeppe- 
lins and submarines — the more formidable because 
England, to-day, is fighting not only for herself 
but for her faith in a law higher than human 
laws, for her English religion of the absolute dis- 
tinction between right and wrong — fighting to 
prevent the upset and confusion of her moral uni- 
verse which must follow the triumph of crime on 
this earth. When such force of will is kindled by 



TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 219 

such an ideal, it is not only of infinite tenacity, it 
grows with resistance. We can follow the action 
of its slow, increasing pressure. Germany was 
already gasping in the grip of the blockade. We 
see her shudder in the midst of her victories, as she 
feels the cold and paralysing clutch close on her 
ever more relentlessly. 

December 1915. 



APPENDICES 



A 

(p. 106) 

The following verses are extracted from a 
volume of poems entitled Marlborough, published 
after the death of Charles Hamilton Sorley, a 
student of Cambridge, killed in action, at the age of 
twenty, on October 13, 1915. They were written at 
the moment when the young volunteer was about 
to start for the seat of war in France, in the month 
of May of the same year. Like those of Rupert 
Brooke and of Julian Grenfell, they express the 
lyrical fervour of the moral and religious feeling 
which inspired so many young men to enlist. 

EXPECTANS EXPECTAVI 

" From mom to midnight, all day through, 
I laugh and play as others do 
I sin and chatter, just the same ; 
As others with a different name. 

And all year long upon the stage, 
I dance and tumble and do rage 
So vehemently, I scarcely see 
The inner and eternal me. 

I have a temple I do not 
Visit, a heart I have forgot, 
A self that I have never met, 
A secret shrine — and yet, and yet 
223 



224 APPENDICES 

This sanctuary of my soul 
Unwittingly I keep white and whole, 
Unlatched and lit, if Thou shouldst care 
To enter or to tarry there. 

With parted lips and outstretched hands 
And listening ears, Thy servant stands ; 
Call Thou early, call Thou late. 
To Thy great service dedicate.^* 



B 

(p. 121) 

As illustrations of the two chapters, The Appeal 
to Conscience and The Men, I may be permitted 
to quote a few extracts from a letter written to 
me (January 31st, 1916) by Mr. H. A. Roberts, a 
member of the University of Cambridge. 

" Your comparison between the spiritual opera- 
tion which induces our men to enlist and a religious 
conversion appears to me very striking. It really 
is extraordinarily close, both in the coming forward 
of the recruit in public (though many more sneak 
away and go quietly to the recruiting office) and 
in the working of the mind in quiet which precedes 
a man's joining the army. Who should know but 
I, who have been Father Confessor in a sense to 
so many of these lads, who have brought me their 
difficulties, their poverty often, and the affairs of 
their families, in which they were the potential 
breadwinners, to talk over, not knowing what to 
do, and unhappy because they hadn't taken the 



APPENDICES 225 

step ; though here, of course, they were protected 
from pressure to a great extent. These lads are, 
of course, the class of student who come from 
poor homes; for you don't need reminding that 
Cambridge nowadays draws from all classes. After 
all, when the thing was put to you as a decision, 
on a matter to which you haven't hitherto given a 
moment's thought, never having been taught that 
war could ever possibly come near you, and not as a 
thing settled before you were born, what a decision 
it was ! All that doesn't mean that I don't like 
the French way best, because I do. But I'm much 
interested in my country just now, and cheered 
also about it. 

" . . .Of course, the volunteering business did 
much to make the discipline sweet at first ; if you 
haven't an army a going concern, and have to 
improvise, I doubt if there's a better way to begin : 
a man who wants to fight the Germans isn't likely 
to begin by kicking his sergeant. 

"... I was much pleased with what you had 
to say on the aspect of the new armies. I never 
realised before that the English were so handsome 
a race. And, as you say, they are gentlemen — 
almost all, that is. 

"... They are like Cromwell's soldiers, ' with a 
goodwill to the work,' or rather they are Crusaders, 
for the most of them — having never thought pro- 
foundly — do not really realise the danger to Eng- 
land. But the crimes of Germany against civilisa- 
tion, her brutality in France and her bestiality in 
Belgium, that they know all about, and it hurts 
them. 
Q 



226 APPENDICES 

" I was struck by the matter-of-fact, quiet way 
in which these lads turned from all their old lives 
just to take up arms. No enthusiasm, no excite- 
ment. The day after war was declared there was a 
partial eclipse of the sun, and you would have said, 
walking down the street in the pale sunlight, that 
England was a country of dumb people. We knew 
the big thing had come; it was too big to shout 
about. These boys have indeed taken away the 
best of England with them. 

" The queer thing is that, in spite of their com- 
position, the new armies are so professionally keen 
that they have positively taken over the very slang 
of the old — the ways and jokes of the soldier — ^that 
they may in no way differ. You know their song, 
of course ? 

" Send out the lads of the Boys' Brigade,^ 
They shall keep Old England free ; 
Send out my brother, my sister, my mother, 
But for Gawd's sake don't send me ! " 

" Now, what does the Hun make of it, if he reads 
that they sing that ? 

" And they call our dear country ' Old Blighty.' 
" Did you read in the papers the delicious story 
of the sing-song in billets? How the officer in 
charge left the sing-song for a few minutes — they 
had some German prisoners there — ^when he came 
back what he heard was this : ' Order, gentlemen, 
please ; our friends 'Ans and Fritz will now oblige 
with the y'mn of 'ate ! ^ " 

1 A kind of inferior Boy Scout affair. 



APPENDICES 227 



(p. 152) 

In his speech on the increase of production of 
munitions (House of Commons, December 20, 
1915), Mr. Lloyd George stated that the War 
Office " had arrived a little late " at the conclusion 
that shrapnel was not enough for the trench war- 
fare, and that a greater number of high explosive 
shells were necessary. He added — 

" Now I will give the House an indication of 
the leeway we had to make up. The Germans at 
that time were turning out about 250,000 shells 
per day, the vast majority of them being high- 
explosives. That is a prodigious figure. The 
French have also been highly successful in the 
quantities which they have been turning out. But 
they have great armies, and their arsenals which 
were turning out the materials of war for their 
army were naturally on a larger scale than ours. 
Our large arsenals naturally took a naval turn, and 
the bulk of the engineers who were turning out 
munitions of war were engaged on naval work, so 
that in the month of May, when the Germans were 
turning out 250,000 shells a day, most of them high- 
explosives, we were turning out 2,500 a day in high- 
explosives and 13,000 in shrapnel." 

The chief difficulties, said the minister, arose 
from the lack of special machinery, from the 
scarcity of labour, from the irregular supply of 
raw material, and from the shipping crisis. 

He explained the means by which these diffi- 



228 APPENDICES 

culties were met. The chief were the creation 
of forty local munitions committees, including the 
great manufacturers of metal -working machines 
in each district, in order to organise the trans- 
formation and equipment of the factories for the 
production of war material. At the head, in 
attendance on the minister, was a council of business 
men and eminent engineers, specialists borrowed 
from the great private firms and companies. Some 
of them were commissioned to inspect the work 
of production in the provinces and in Canada, and 
to make inquiries into the difficulties of each 
establishment. Without giving actual figures, 
Mr. Lloyd George indicated roughly the progress 
made by pointing out the abundance of munitions 
available at the Battle of Loos in September. 
Although this battle lasted several weeks, and the 
daily expenditure of shells was enormous, they 
never ran short. We were able, added the minister, 
to replace this amount of munitions in a month, 
and we shall soon be in a position to produce as 
much in a week. 

The cost of the shells diminished between May 
and December, thanks to the new organisation, by 
from forty to thirty per cent, according to the 
kind of shell. 

D 

(p. 181) 

On January 26 and 27, 1916, the Labour Con- 
ference, consisting of delegates from the trade 
unions, representatives of the Socialist bodies, of 



APPENDICES 229 

the Trades Union Central Committee, and of the 
Parliamentary Labour Committee, representing 
2,205,000 members, passed the following resolu- 
tions. By a majority of 900,000 votes it " ap- 
proved " of the war and undertook " to aid the 
Government to conduct it to the end." By a 
majority of 1,641,000 votes it affirmed its approval 
of the part taken by the Labour Party in the re- 
cruiting campaign (the minority represents the 
Independent Labour Party, which refused to take 
part in it). By a majority of 1,577,000 votes it 
voted against " any form of conscription as being 
contrary to the spirit of democracy." By a major- 
ity of 1,456,000 votes it voted against the conscrip- 
tion law, which had just been passed by Parliament. 
But whilst the representatives of 600,000 miners 
abstained, it decided by 649,000 votes to 614,000 
not to agitate against the new law. 

To understand these votes it must not be for- 
gotten that we are not here dealing with a referen- 
dum, but that the conference was composed of 
leaders and representatives — of those who think for 
the party. As we have said, many of them voted 
by virtue of credentials somewhat old, so that at 
the Trade Union Congress, held in London on 
January 8, 1916, where the majority voted against 
the principle of compulsory service, the Labour 
members of the Cabinet (Messrs. Henderson, Brace 
and Roberts) were able to challenge the members 
of Parliament who led this majority to resign and 
attempt re-election by their constituents. The latter 
had more than once disavowed them before the Con- 
ference of the 26th. (Take, for example, the protest 



230 APPENDICES 

of the engineers of Hartlepool against the vote of 
the delegates of their union at the congress of Janu- 
ary 8.) The political theorists of the party speak 
and demonstrate, but as one of them, Mr. G. H. 
Roberts, M.P., said at the conference, " they would 
not take the responsibility of actually refusing the 
men demanded by the military experts." Oppo- 
nents of the law, like Mr. Will Thorne and Mr. F. S. 
Bulton, acknowledged plainly, at the same meeting, 
that the law could not be resisted by strikes, and 
that the workmen would refuse to take part in 
them if they were ordered. 



E 

(p. 205) 

Since the first publication (in French) of these 
pages the House of Commons has approved by an 
enormous majority the Conscription Bill, intro- 
duced on January 4 by Mr. Asquith. As we 
predicted, everything was done to attenuate and 
disguise the revolutionary nature of the measure. 
It is partial, referring only to unmarried men and 
widowers without children. The principle of re- 
cruiting the army by voluntary enlistment is still 
affirmed in the text of the measure which intro- 
duces compulsory service, for the bill declares that 
these men " will be held to have enlisted according 
to Lord Derby's system." What we said of the 
strength, in England, of the idea that conscience is 
inviolable, and of the part it played in the minds 
of many anti-conscriptionists, is borne out by the 



APPENDICES 231 

clause of the Act which dispenses from armed 
service every man who declares that he objects 
to it from conscientious motives. (Special tri- 
bunals examine the sincerity of the conscientious 
objectors, and the grounds for other exemptions.) 

Mr. Asquith felt justified in saying when he 
introduced the bill : " The measure which I am 
introducing can be perfectly well supported by 
those whose principles are opposed to conscrip- 
tion." The idea is still that of a moral obligation. 
What is attempted is to stimulate, and then to 
compel the minority which has not done its duty, 
to do it. This is why, after Lord Derby's lists 
had been declared closed, they were reopened, so 
that the unmarried men aimed at by the law (on 
January 5, 650,000 of them had not yet presented 
themselves) might have, to the last moment, the 
opportunity of enlisting as volunteers, that is to 
say, of putting themselves on the same footing 
as those who had enlisted before them, and joining 
the army without discredit. In February the last 
appeal was posted on the walls — 

" Will you march too. 
Or will you wait till March two ? ^^ 

It was with reference to these new delays that 
Mr. Asquith defended his proposed legislation, by 
saying that there would possibly be no need to 
put it into operation. 



INDEX 



Advbrtisikg methods, 95, 96, 
98, 99, 100 

Agadir, 1, 16, 17, 25 

Algeciras, 16 

Army, English, the new and the 
old, 103 

Army, evolution of the, 120 

Army, new, organisation of the, 
119, 120 

Army, Territorial, 17 

Arrest of emigrants begins a 
new epoch, 199 

Asquith, Mr., opposes conscrip- 
tion, 18, 140; introduces con- 
scription, 231 

Atrocities, German, not believed 
at first, 44, 45; main cause 
of Enghsh efEorts, 46, 210-11 

Bachelors, compulsion of, 185 

Bannerman, Sir H. C, 15 

Barclay, Sir Thomas, 133 

Begbie, Harold, poem quoted, 
92 

Bernhardi, 6, 46 

Bethmann-HoUweg, his panic, 
31 

Betrothals in England, 79 

Biberstein, Baron, 25 

Binyon, Laurence, poem by, 
37 

Blatchford, 18 

Blncher, the, 43 

Boer War, 136, 137 

Bosnia, 16 

Botha, the, 42 

Business methods in the recruit- 
ing propaganda, 96 

Caillaux trial, the, 3 



Cambridge, 114; enlistment of 

students at, 83 
Canterbury, Archbishop of, 198 
Carlyle, 89 
Carson, Sir Edward, 42; raises 

rebel army, 76 
Caste distinctions in new army, 

113 
CaveU, Miss, 170 
Centenary of '98, 77 
Chamberlain, Houston, 168 
Chaplains, army, 112 
Chesterton, G. K., 12, 167 
Christianity inspires English 

Liberals, 28, 29 
Church, the village, 65, 68-70 
Clergy exempted, 198 
Coahtion, the, 136, 156 
Conscience, appeals to, in Eng- 
land, source of reforms, 88-90 
Conscientious objectors, the, 

164-8, 198 
Conscription, why impossible at 

first, 84; opponents of, 148; 

historic precedents for, 188- 

190 
Conscription Bill (Jan. 1916), 231 
Conscriptionists' campaign, 18- 

20 
Countryside, the English, 61-64 
County people, 59 
Cramb, Prof., 18, 47 
Critics, EngUsh, of England, 

109, 112 
CromweU, 21, 235 
Crooks, Mr. WiU, 93 



Daily News, the, 26, 27; ceases 
to oppose war, 38 



233 



234 



INDEX 



*' Damned Professors," 48 

Defence of the Realm Act, 
147 

Delcasse, M., attacked by French 
Press, 30 

Democracy, weakness of, 146 

Derby, Lord, 95, 191 

Deutschland uher alles, 111 

Dickinson, Mr. L., 167 

Dilke, Sir C, 133 

Donnington Hall, 44 

Doukhobors, 198 

Duties, conflict of, 90, 93 

Dysart, Lord, on EngUsh free- 
dom, 23 

Education in England, 47, 66, 
78, 105, 130 

Emdtn, the, 44 

England, did not want war, 6; 
before the war, 11-14; why 
she made war, 34-5; an 
estate, 81 ; compared with 
United States, 123; com- 
pared with France, 65-6, 
134, 143; compared with 
Japan, 61, 70 ; compared with 
Russia, 28, 198 

England's "pledge" to France, 
31-7, 124 

English, not intellectual, 114, 
133, 134, 206; dislike innova- 
tion, 12; not decadent, 216, 
217; mind irrational, 116; 
methods evolutionary, 8, 9, 
59, 60, 131, 201; regard war 
as a crusade, 55, 56; con- 
trasted with Germans, 6, 7, 51 ; 
physique, 134; psychology, 8, 
9, 106-15, 135, 142-3 ; slowness 
of, explained, 128, 132, 142, 
200; ideas of war, 39-44, 118; 
revolution, 11; pride, 24, 144, 
223; education, 47, 66, 75, 
106, 133 

" EngUsh insincerity," 107 

Etiquette, EngUsh, 107 

Eton, 113 

Expectans expectavi (by C. H. 
Sorley), 223 



Farmer, young, consults author, 
91 

FeeUngs of soldiers (letter), 
106 

" Final, the Grand Inter- 
national," 99, 110 

Fontenoy, 43 

Football, 42, 109 

Freedom, EngUsh, 23, 120 

French, General, 37 

French Revolution, 1 

Galsworthy, 12, 218 

Game, life a, 39, 45, 107, 109 

Gas, effect of, 54 

Gentleman, the EngUsh, 40-2, 
143 

George, Lloyd, 67, 82, 83, 138, 
156, 177, 178, 202, 227 

German, " Hatred," 49-50; pre- 
war writings, 6; influence on 
Radicals, 39; mistakes about 
England, 39, 51, 120, 218; 
metaphysical camel, 7, 8 

Germans in England, 21, 45; 
accuse England of deceit, 
31-3 

Germany the Devil, 47, 90, 165, 
210; a mechanism, 130, 209; 
throws away her trumps, 53 

Gladstone, 28, 82 

" God save the King," 69, 111 

Goschen, Sir Edward, 50 

Grey, Sir Edward, as Mephisto- 
pheles, 5 ; and Treaty of Lon- 
don, 15; "must go," 27; his 
procrastination explained, 29- 
33; guarantees French coast, 
36; his delay an advantage, 
38, 141 

General Army Staff, the, 213 

Girls, recruiting appeals to, 86 

Haldane, Lord, visits Berlin, 15, 

139, 145, 147 
Hamworth, Sir A., 164 
" Happy-go-lucky System," 132, 

216 
Harrison, Austin, 18, 122 
Harrison, Frederick, 18 



INDEX 



235 



Hedin, Sven, 128 
Henderson, Mr., 179, 229 
Hewit, C, case of, 178 
Hobhouse, Mr., 160 
Honourable Artillery Company, 

117 
"Huns," not playing fair, 112; 

" respectable," 112 
Hyde Park, 59; speakers in, 76 
Hymn of Hate, 111, 226 
Hyndman, H. M., 158 

Imperial federation, 214 

Imperialism, reaction against, 
12 

Income Tax, 82 

Independent Labour Party 
organ of Divine Will, 167 

Interests, British, never men- 
tioned now, 38 

Irrational, tbe, omnipotent, 5, 
169 

Japan compared with England, 

61, 70, 216 
Jaur^s, 4 
Junkers, English, 162 

Kiel, 210 

King Jean le Bon, 44 

Kiphng, Rudyard, 18, 48, 49, 

78, 85, 110, 133, 218 
Kitchener, Lord, 74, 85, 125, 

195 
Knight, the French, 41 
Kruger, President, statue of, 42 
Kuhlmann, Herr Von, 26 
Kultur and the gorilla, 49 

Labour Conference (Jan. 26, 
1916), 229 

Labourers, the Enghsh, 63, 91 

Laisser faire, 95, 214 

Lansbury, Mr., 160 

Leaders, German, 137 

Leaders, English, 139-40; paci- 
fists, 209 

Liberals, EngHsh, and the war, 
141 ; Christian, 28, 29 

Lichnowsky, Prince, 26 



Lieutenants, 113 

Lincoln, President, 84 

" Little Englanders," 4 

Logic, failure of, 127 

London, during war, 57-60; 

Declaration of, 139, 140 
Loos, Battle of, 228 
Louis XIV, 82 
Love in England, 86 
Lusitania, the, 52, 54 
Lyttelton, Dr., 166 

Macdonald, Ramsay, 167, 168 

Mafeking, 42 

Manchester Guardian favours 

Austria, 30 
Marne, Battle of the, 209 
"Marseillaise," 111 
Maxse, JVIr., 18 

Merthyr Election, 171, 180, 181 
Milton, 79, 106 
Mommsen, 40 
Morel, Mr. E. D., 27; founds 

U.D.C., 168 
" Muddling through," 135 
Munitions Act, 167, 176 
Munitions Scandal, the, 127, 149, 

154 

National Register, the, 158 
" Naval Holidays," 16 
Navy, the Enghsh, 144 
Nelson, 80, 124, 195 
New College, memorial tablets 

in, 43 
Nietzsche, 41, 46, 47 
No -Conscription Fellowship, 164, 

198 

Oath, the soldiers', 100 

Pankhurst, Mrs., 204 
Pessimistic newspapers, 67, 80, 

84, 127, 156 
Pigou, Prof., 167 
Pink Forms, the, 194 
Poincare, President, appeals to 

England, 31, 33 
Postmaster-General's letter, 197 
Prayers for the enemy, 41, 42 



236 



INDEX 



Pride, EngHsh, 24, 144, 223 
Prisoners, German outrages on, 

52 
Pro-Boers, 28 
Pro-Germans, 168 
Protestantism in England, 79 
Psychology, English, 8, 9, 107- 

15, 133, 141-2 
Punch quoted, 49, 110 

Recruits, the, 115 

Recruiting committees, 202 

Recruiting compared to conver- 
sion, 94, 224 

Recruiting posters, 11, 73, 74, 85, 
86, 87, 88, 94, 99, 100, 231 

Revolution, the English, 11 

Roberts, Lord, opposed by both 
parties, 13; his conscription 
campaign, 18, 85, 138 

Roberts, Mr. H. A., letter of, 
224 

Rosebery, Lord, 134 

" Royal Standbacks," 90 

Ruskin, 87 

Russia, land of mystics, 28, 
198 

Russian retreat, the, 183 

Salter, Dr. A., 165 

Salvation Army, 76, 85, 97 

Sandhurst, 114 

Sarolea, Dr., 18 

Sazonoff, M., warns England, 31, 
34 

Secondary schools, 78 

Seeberg, Prof., 122 

Seely, Colonel, on conscription, 
24 

Self-government, 77, 78, 82 

Shakespeare, 64, 72 

Shaw, Bernard, 12, 163 

Simon, Sir John, on conscrip- 
tion, 24 

" Slackers," the, 183, 195 

SmiUie, Mr. R., 162 

Socialist Committee for National 
Defence, the, 159, 182 

Socialism, religious, in England, 
89, 121 



Socialists, English, and the war, 

158-64 
Soldiers formerly suspected and 

despised in England, 22 
Songs, soldiers'. 111, 236 
Special constables, 83 
Spencer, Herbert, 160, 216 
Stanton, Mr., 180 
" Starred men," the, 195 
Stead, W. T., 18 
Strike, Welsh, 162, 176; Clyde, 

175 
Submarines, effect of, 52 
Survival of the unfit, 174 

Tariff reform, 216 

Taxi-cabs as recruiting agents, 
97 

Tea, five o'clock, 109 

Thomas, Mr., M.P., 163 

Three Years' Service Law, the 
French, 3 

Tillett, Mr. Ben, 93 

Titanic, the, 60 

Trade Union Congress, 177 

Trade Union Rights Com- 
mittees, 174 

Trade Unions, 131, 151 

Treitschke, Prof., 6, 38, 46, 122 

Ulster, 20, 199 

Union of Democratic Control, 

the, 168; meeting of (Nov. 

29, 1915), 171 

Voluntary compulsory service, 

196 
Voluntary effort in England, 76 
Voluntary system seen to con- 
flict with justice, 120 

"Wait and see," 95, 124, 138, 

155 
War against war, 165 
War Office, failure of the, 126, 

149 
War Committee, the, 213 
War and boxing, 115 
" We^ll never give in,^' 141 
Wells, H. G., 12, 75, 156, 214 



INDEX 



237 



Wesley, 85 

" We've given our four" 102 

Wilson, President, too proud to 

fight, 29 
William II to be hanged, 141 
Women, recruiting appeals to, 

86, 87 ; Ruskin on, 87 



Words, power of, in England, 

195 
Workmen and the war, 171-81: 

ignorance of, 45, 176, 183 
World, irrational, 169 

Zeppelins, their effect, 50, 52 



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SOME IMPORTANT WAR BOOKS 
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